knotwave | Reading

I'll try to remember to upload the pic later. It's not a very good picture, but then, I was wary of trying to get too close.

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pshaw_raven

1. What is your favourite fruit?
Almost any citrus. I love grapefruit and I'm glad I'm off the meds that didn't allow me to have them.

2. What is the last book you read?
"The Difficulty in Being Good" by Gurcharan Das, a book about ethics in the Mahabharata.

3. Do you like any of your school photos?
Holy shit no.

4. Do you ever blowdry your armpits to get the deodorant to dry quicker?
I'm sorry, do I WHAT?

5. What was the last film you watched?
Coco - the Pixar movie. Really enjoyed it :)

Current Mood: awake

prettygoodword

mezcal (meh-SKAL) - n., a Mexican liquor distilled from a fermented mash of roasted agave hearts; any agave that mezcal is made from, also called maguey.

mescal (meh-SKAL) - n., alternate spelling of the liquor mezcal; either of two species of spineless, dome-shaped cactus, Lophophora williamsii or L. diffusa, usually called peyote, that produces the hallucinogen peyote.

Mexican natives fermented roasted agave hearts well before Spaniards arrived. The Spanish fermented this drink, which they called pulque (origin of the name unknown but possibly Nahuatl), to create mezcal/mescal/mexcal, as they variously spelled it, deriving the name from Nahuatl mexcalli, roasted agave, from metl, agave + ixcalli, baked/cooked thing. Tequila (named after a town in Jalasco, from Nahuatl Tecuila, place of tribute) is a mezcal made specifically from blue agave (Agave tequilana) in a specific region -- much like champagne is only made in a specific region. The cactus name is a misapplication of the agave name that no one can explain, and I only included that sense because the hallucinogenic compound it contains is called mescaline after it.

That was more complicated than I expected. I'm regretting not running this earlier in exchange for a simpler entry, because I held over a bonus word that I don't think I can get away with not running in a words-from-Nahuatl week:

axolotl (AK-suh-law-tuhl) - n., a paedomorphic salamander (Ambystoma mexicanum) native to lakes in what is now Mexico City.

The above is the standard English pronunciation. The name is taken directly from Classical Nahuatl āxōlōtl, pronounced ay-shoh-lohtsch, which is generally understood as from ātl, water +‎ xōlōtl, male servant, though the latter might have also meant axolotl, with the prefix added to distinguish the salamander from actual male servants.

And that finishes this theme week, and uses up all my planned words from various Native American/First Nations languages of North America. Back next week with the usual assorted heap.

---L.

conuly

Beautiful weather and all.

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conuly

We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.
We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions.
We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts.
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations.
In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on.
Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.

If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way.
In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself.
Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle
your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we
are unable to find the key to your legal case.

You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile.
You are not presumed to be innocent if the police
have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet.
It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color.
It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.

Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude.
You have no rights we are bound to respect.
Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible
for what happens to you.

***********

Link

conuly

“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

Not many of us get to die for our beliefs.

prettygoodword

chipotle (chi-POHT-lay, chee-PAWT-le) - n., a ripe jalapeño pepper dried and smoked for use in cooking.

Thanks, WikiMedia!

Dictionaries pronunciation guides also give other combinations of those syllables, but I have only so many pixels here. Jalapeños are a cultivar of Capsicum annuum developed in Xalapa (formerly spelled Jalapa), Veracruz, Mexico, and the green ones you usually see were picked while they were, well, still green, as in unripened. [Sidebar: Xalapa's name is from Classical Nahuatl Xalapan, from xālli, sand + āpan, place of water, so roughly "spring in the sand."] When ripe, jalapeños are red like most chilies, and chipotles are made by letting them ripen and dry on the vine, then picking them and smoking them for several days, traditionally for six days using pecan wood. The word was taken in the early 1920s from Mexican Spanish chipotle/chilpotle/chilpocle, from Classical Nahautl chīlpōctli, from chīlli, pepper + pōctli, smoke.

---L.

thewayne

Kirk, a conservative activist, was the founder of Turning Point USA and a regular speaker at colleges and universities. He would challenge people to debates and was good at turning said debates to conservative talking points.

The shooting happened not long after his talk began, his security rushed him to a hospital where he was later pronounced dead. The campus, Utah Valley University in Orem, went into lock-down and shelter in place. While one arrest was made on-site, that person was later released. The assassin is still at large at this time.

POTUS has ordered flags at the White House to half-mast and Mike Johnson a moment of silence in the House of Reps.

It is reported that the shooter was on the roof of a near-by building, about 200' away.

Tots and pears. It's hard for me to say that our political process should not devolve into violence when the party in power incites violence daily.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/live/charlie-kirk-shooting-live-updates-conservative-activist-shot-at-utah-valley-university-event-school-says-190606372.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/live-updates-shooting-charlie-kirk-event-utah-rcna230437

conuly

And they now expect the part in tomorrow, at which point we should be able to make an appointment to repair.

As I reiterated - but briefly, because the person making the call was not responsible for this situation - a delay in shipping is one thing, but lack of communication is something very different.

prettygoodword

mesquite (me-SKEET, MES-keet) - n., any of a dozen species (genera Neltuma and Strombocarpa, both formerly part of Prosopis) of spiny deciduous New World trees and shrubs with bipinnate leaves and beanlike pods and often forming dense thickets; the wood of these trees, charcoal made from this wood; land dominated by mesquite trees.

Thanks, WikiMedia!

The pods of most mesquites are edible once dried, and those of the velvet mesquite pictured above are still ground and baked into a staple bread by traditional Tohono O'odham on the reservation west of town. We have two intentional mesquites in our yard, and several volunteers. Most species are arid-adapted, and outside the Americas are considered a noxious invasive weed (see: volunteers easily). They are hardwoods that grow very slowly (see: arid), which makes for a dense wood that burns slow and hot that as a bonus has a nicely flavored smoke -- making it great for grilling. Mesquite honey is readily available locally, and I prefer it over any other honey source, even clover. The name dates to the 1830s, taken from Mexican Spanish mezquite, from the Nahuatl name mizquitl.

---L.

conuly

I sent them another voicemail and email saying that a delay in shipping or even ordering a part may be acceptable, understandable, or forgivable, but lack of communication is none of those things and if they don't get back to me with an ETA on this repair then they'll have to refund our deposit so we can call somebody else.

Either way, I know how I'm spending the next few hours (laundromat) and how I'm spending tomorrow morning (phone).

prettygoodword

ocelot (OS-uh-lot, OH-suh-lot) - n., a medium-sized spotted wild cat (Leopardus pardalis, formerly Felis pardalis) of Central and South America with a grayish or yellow coat with stripy black spots.

Thanks, WikiMedia!

Although I live at the very edge of their territory, I have only seen them in captivity and Minecraft -- which is as it should be as they are nocturnal and live in brushy woodlands, and have not adapted to human environments the way coyotes have. [Sidebar: Yes, captive ocelots do oscillate in an enclosure.] The name is from Nahuatl, but not the Nahuatl name for the ocelot -- ōcēlōtl is jaguar, while the ocelot is tlālocēlōtl, literally "field jaguar." It's not clear whether French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon, who introduced the name in 1765, made a mistake or deliberately shortened the long name. [Sidebar: Although ocelots can have ocellated ("eye-shaped") spots, the words are otherwise unrelated, ocellated coming from Latin. The pun may have been a reason to shorten the name, though.]

---L.

prettygoodword

A week of miscellaneous words from Nahuatl [along with a sidebar reminder that the -tl suffix in Nahuatl sounds a lot softer than it looks, closer to -tsch than -tuhl] starting with:

coyote (kai-OH-tee, KAI-oht) - n., a wolflike carnivorous canid (Canis latrans) of North America, with buff-gray to reddish-gray fur, large erect ears, and a drooping bushy tail.

coyote is not impressed by the paparazzi

Thanks, WikiMedia!

Also called prairie wolf and American jackal -- the former because it resembles a smaller, gracile wolf, the latter because it fills much the same ecological niche that jackals do in Eurasia. Coyotes have adapted very well to urban environments, to the point that their range has been expanding over the last century as humans have extended their range -- we can hear coyote choruses of yips and howls several nights a year, and meet them in alleys at dawn. [Sidebar: our cats are indoor cats yes indeedy.] Before migrants to the American Southwest came to dominate the population here, the pronunciation used to be a shibboleth: only imports called them kai-OH-tee, while locals used KAI-oht. Taken in the 1750s from Mexican Spanish (where it always has three syllables), from Nahuatl coyōtl.

---L.

thewayne

This is really cool.

In the town of Pornainen, they've built a 13 meter tall battery of "low-grade" sand that they warm-up to 450 degrees C - that 842 degrees F! - and it can hold that temperatures for weeks if not months, then they can use the hot air from it to heat the town's local heating network!

I think that's a pretty awesome use. They're using excess energy generated by renewable sources - free energy - to heat up the sand, then piping it around town. The former method to warm up the town was a woodchip furnace plant, clearly they're drastically cutting their CO2 footprint with this. And by using low-grade sand, their costs are pretty low.

But let's talk about sand for a minute. Businesses are literally dredging up ocean floors for sand to make more concrete. And you can't recover it from broken-up concrete when buildings are demolished. Now, to use sand to make a thermal battery I think is a worthwhile endeavor. I just wish they'd work out better ways to repurpose and recycle existing demolished concrete.

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/sand-battery-renewable-energy-finland-b2818348.html

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/09/06/027211/a-very-finnish-thing-huge-sand-battery-starts-storing-wind-energy-in-soapstone

thewayne

To briefly recap, a group of authors sued the AI company Anthropic for pirating their books off the internet through illegal downloads and incorporating it into their AI data training sets, alleging piracy, copyright violation and theft. Which it clearly was. In an interesting twist, Anthropic then went out and bought quite literally tons of books, cut the spines off of them, scanned the pages, then trashed the then-scanned books, claiming the rights of first-ownership that they could do what they wanted to with the books.

But that was a bit of ex post facto reasoning: they'd already committed the crime of stealing the contents of the books, subsequently buying them after having already incorporated the contents into the datasets doesn't make it all better.

From the article: "In June, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of the books in training models was “exceedingly transformative,” one of the factors courts have used in determining whether the use of protected works without authorization was a legal “fair use.” His decision was the first major decision that weighed the fair use question in generative AI systems.

Yet Alsup also ruled that Anthropic had to face a trial on the question of whether it is liable for downloading millions of pirated books in digital form off the internet, something it had to do in order to train its models for its AI service Claude. The books were obtained from datasets Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.

“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote. (emphasis mine)

The piracy issue was a huge one. in court, Anthropic IT staff testified that they used bit torrent software to download vast troves of books at the direction of management. The problem is with bit torrent. Bit torrent uses "seeds". When you download a file, you are downloading small pieces of it from many clients and servers from around the world. And your computer becomes one such piece of this network and starts serving up pieces of the files that you've downloaded to people requesting those files.

As a general rule, companies don't go after people downloading pirated material if they're not downloading it 24/7/365. But they do go after people providing pirated material! And if you use bit torrent software to download pirated material, you're downloading AND uploading material that shouldn't be shared! Eventually they're going to notice you and their attorneys are going to dust off their giant mallets of loving correction.

I've used bit torrent software before. But what I use it for is downloading books that I've bought from Humble Bundle where I've got 20 large PDF books to download, it's the only practical way to do it even when I have a fairly fast fiberoptic internet connection. And I leave my torrent connection open so other people who've bought the bundle can benefit from my PC having those books on it.

I have no idea how many books Anthropic downloaded. It's quite possible that Anthropic has no absolute count as to how many books they downloaded. And that's probably why they agreed to this settlement. They wanted to avoid a damages trial which would dig into exactly how many books they had stolen.

And let's take that one step further. This would have branded them - in court! - as the world's largest piracy case. EVER. That's one thing that they definitely did not want to be branded with. A great big Scarlet P that they would wear forever. Much better to pay $1.5 billion and be rid of it.

Two additional things about this of interest. First, the settlement only covers their misdeeds through August 25. If they are found to have conducted any additional piracy after this date, then all the court processes could get reset and everything starts over again. Second, and this is the most significant part: "Anthropic also has agreed to destroy the datasets used in its models."

I have no idea what this fully means. Since they bought all these books and scanned them, they presumably have an even better dataset on standby once this pirated set is destroyed, so it shouldn't affect them much. Perhaps this is purely a symbolic victory, but it is an important one. We shall see.

https://deadline.com/2025/09/anthropic-ai-lawsuit-settlement-1-5-billion-1236509423/

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/05/1941245/anthropic-agrees-to-pay-record-15-billion-to-settle-authors-ai-lawsuit

thewayne

Natron had been trying to raise $1.4b in funding to build a mega-factory in North Carolina that would have employed 1,000 people. It failed. Sales for its industrial sodium-ion batteries were not enough to keep the 13-year old company in the black, and an excellent tech company is no more.

Sodium-ion batteries have some great tech advantages over lithium-ion. Most importantly, they don't catch on fire as easily. They don't use lithium, so they're less expensive and don't consume a rare earth mineral. Sodium is much more readily available and cheaper to produce. They also don't use copper, a somewhat rare mineral, and using aluminum instead of copper makes for a much lighter battery.

However, sodium-ion has a lower energy density than lithium-ion, which makes it a bit less desirable than LIon. Whether this disadvantage can be overcome in time, we shall see.

I have no idea if this company's products were targeted for the EV market, or just for industrial use.

https://www.wral.com/story/battery-maker-natron-closes-shop-killing-plans-for-1-000-jobs-in-north-carolina/22144342/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/09/05/2126200/americas-first-sodium-ion-battery-manufacturer-ceases-operations

conuly

I had absolutely no idea!

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pshaw_raven

Friday was also a crazy-busy day and I'm so ready to just be on the road. I know I'll have all this vacation time but I do best when I have a little bit of down time each day. I did manage to get a lifting workout in (stronk) and I dropped the key off to my neighbor and got to see her two new chickens, Macaroni and Cheese. She's letting her kids name them, and it's probably going better than if I were naming chickens and calling them stuff like Pepper and General Tso. Anyway, they're primarily egg layers, so they've got a while before they end up in a pot.

But the camper's been collapsed and everything, we hitched up the truck last night. I've started having us reverse roles - Fox directs me and I back the truck up. I'm terrible at guiding him and it's very stressful, for me anyway. He can get kind of frustrated when I can't describe what I want him to do. We have last-minute things we need this morning but we're generally ready to go.

Some of my pumpkins are turning yellow and orange now. They actually turn a sort of milky orange when they're ready to harvest, or a sort of warm beige, it's a difficult color to describe. But as I was checking on those I found MORE new pumpkins starting to grow at the ends of the vines! Maybe I should start farming pumpkins.

No really. What if I took some of the cleared area on the east side of our property and converted it to just pumpkin fields. Plant a bunch of pumpkin vines and then sell them at a farm stand. Or for an upcharge, sell roasted and canned pumpkin puree, ready to go. Fox has a minor interest in hobby farms. I don't think I've ever seen anyone selling pie pumpkins - tomatoes, honey, eggs, peppers, but the few times I've seen someone selling pumpkins, they were jack-o-lanterns or decorative "lumpy" pumpkins. Of course, maybe that's because everyone's growing Seminoles. Market research is needed.

Anyway, this afternoon we'll be set up at Fort Wilderness and I can chill. Actually my stress levels drop a lot once we're on the road.

Current Mood: anxious
Current Music: Robert Palmer - Simply Irresistable

prettygoodword

sockeye (SAWK-ai) - n., a small Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) that spawns in rivers of the northern Pacific.

Thanks, WikiMedia!

For "northern" read, as far as North America is concerned, "north of the Columbia River." Much sought after by commercial fisheries. The one above is in spawning colors -- the rest of their lives, they are the color the head is. The name, which in English dates to 1867, is from a Salishan language of British Columbia, probably Halkomelem, spoken on southern Vancouver Island and the lower Frasier River, sθəqəy̓ (pronounced something like suk-kegh), which was altered by folk etymology. [Sidebar: Halkomelem is also the source of sasquatch.]

And because I can't count and actually collected 6 words for the 5-day week, a bonus word that turns out to be an edge case:

muckamuck or muckety-muck, often high muckamuck - n., an important and often arrogant person.

Originally, and this is a dated PNW regionalism, both "food" and "to eat food," and high muckamuck was "to eat at the high/front table," which then transferred to those who eat there. This is from Chinook Jargon, a pidgin trade language / creole of the Pacific Northwest (originating in the Lower Columbia River valley) that borrowed heavily from indigenous languages of the region, including the Chinook language itself spoken along the Lower Columbia River. However, comma, no native source for muckamuck has been identified, and it appears to have been a coinage in Chinook Jargon (not the only word coined in it, thus it being considered almost a creole and not just a pidgin).

And that wraps up a week of assorted words from Native American / First Nations languages. I've one more theme-group along these lines, so I'll get that one out of the way next week.

---L.

pshaw_raven

Yesterday was so incredibly busy, y'all. Today should be somewhat less so, and we'll spend it packing for the trip, getting the camper buttoned up and ready to roll, and probably hitching the truck so that Saturday we can just hop in and go. I decided to run my last-minute errands yesterday and get our camping food, and pick up a mechanical water controller for the garden.

Problem was, I bought one in a cardboard box. A nice one. And I got it home and found someone had managed to replace the good Rain Bird device with a cheap Orbitz one, so now I have to head back into town (another half-hour drive) to replace it. I can't blame Home Depot for not catching this, because the scammers went so far as to get those clear, round tape seals, so the box looked like it hadn't been opened, so the returns person wouldn't have thought it needed checking before reshelving it. I'm just irritated I had to spend the extra time on that bullshit when I could have been playing Silksong, packing, picking my nose, or literally any thing other than that.

So by the time we'd eaten dinner my brain was exhausted. I was in that state where I'm too tired to think, but my mind won't slow down enough to let me relax or sleep, so I start getting cranky and forgetting how language works. Fun fact - for me, the next stage of this is a meltdown. I did not have one, but I did have a terrible night of sleep. I had way too much input and not enough down time.

Silksong is great, of course. Last night I made it past the first two boss fights, and before bed got stuck on a sort of mini-boss or unnamed boss - the ant with a skull mask. I have not quite gotten the hang of Hornet's downward strike attack - it doesn't work like Hollow Knight's "nail pogo." Hornet feels light and takes knockback in the same way, but she is much faster and more acrobatic, even without any movement upgrades. I'm going to load the game onto my Steam Deck to take with me, though I'm a little torn about the small screen. I'm very spoiled by my billboard-sized curved monitor and now everything that isn't the size of a drive in movie screen is like looking at a postage stamp.

I settled on painting my nails a dusky purple. If it were a little redder, it would remind me of mimeograph fluid.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Norah Jones - Come Away With Me