Aaron Weber

Design

Bookdwarf has been fiddling with CSS and so forth as she updates her blog (Sample problem: If you have a 200 pixel wide div on the left, and a dynamic div on the right that has a width set to, say, 70%, how do you get a banner image at the top of the page to run from the leftmost edge of the page to the rightmost edge of the right-hand div? Can you set the width to be 70% + 200px?). So, I figured, it was time to update my blog. Spring cleaning if you will. Big changes.

I’ve increased the red and blue background values from 66 to 76, leaving the green value at 66, making it darker and slightly purple-ish, and then chose a lighter grey for the title and description so they’re legible in the new background color. I then narrowed the left margin area allotted to the links bar from 22 to 21 percent of the page width. I think that should do it for another year or so, eh?

Oh, and if it doesn’t look good in Internet Explorer, get a real browser, shitbird.

Straight Dope

Straight Dope, man. What a column. And here it illustrates, as always, that English is a very weird language:

Penis is a third declension noun, not second declension. These nouns often end in -is in the singular and -es in the plural. The English style -ises is sometimes preferred. Hence, we have penises (half of us do, anyway), and mantises and pelvises, but only more rarely do you see penes, mantes, and pelves, though they are not incorrect. In many cases, only the Latin form is acceptable: We have testes (some more than others) and crises and psychoses, but never testises, crisises, or pyschosises.

I always get annoyed when people say “forums” instead of the obviously more correct “fora.” But I’ve had to give in: “fora” is, frankly, pretentious, and therefore is perfect for this site, but it doesn’t fit on something like, say, Go-Mono, which actually does have fora. Or forums. A discussion board, anyway.

Friendster, Craftster, etc.

On a whim, I invited Brad DeLong, former Clinton appointee and current Berkeley Econ prof, to be my friend on Orkut. I didn’t imagine that he’d accept, but he did! Now I can list myself as a fan!

It’s a strange day in this country when we have more than one celebrity economist. It’s a good day, I think. I mean, where are our priorities? Paris Hilton, Paul Krugman, Kobe Bryant, Brad Delong, Arianna Huffington… it’s good to know that there are at least a few public intellectuals out there.

Gentle Mocking

Someone unearthed an old and somewhat embarrassing picture of Mike Wolf, Ximian/Novell sysadmin and pal, and I turned it into a Planet GNOME icon:

Owning your own home

Home-ownership. What a dream: buy a broken-down wreck for a few hundred grand, then match the purchase price in repairs, match it again in sweat and heartbreak, and you’ve got a beautiful building, one you love and know, one that is you. You have roots. Roots.

Also, off-street parking. Mmmm, off-street.

No War for Tropical Fruit

You know, let’s skip turning Haiti into a nation-building exercise. We’ve got our hands full, we helped Aristide out once or twice before, and of course they don’t have any oil. So on the whole, you know, we should probably just leave it to fester until it becomes a real emergency.

And in bizarre medical news

Chewable contraceptives. Of course. What are they, for children? I hear they plan on making them with cute shapes. Wait til someone’s child actually does eat a box of these spearmint-flavored goodies.

Vaguely related Volokh post about government-imposed bias in scientific research, notably related to forcing additional delays to study the effects of emergency contraception, even though it’s been proven effective.

Nausea

I was feeling better, ate a banana, drank some tea, quit shivering. And so I started browsing Orkut and now I’m doing that thing where you look up people you used to know and wonder where it all went wrong and I feel sick to my stomach again.

Sick sick sick

My least favorite pastime: emesis.

What a way to spend a holiday.

Rawk

NYT article on a snowmobile race where a few years back “a snowmobile racer was rushed to a hospital when his corneas froze. And then there was the year the temperature dropped to 31 degrees below zero, and the portable toilets filled with ice.”

Race motorcycles get up towards 150, maybe 200 mph with six or seven hundred cc’s, but they’re on asphalt and are (relatively speaking) stable because of the gyroscopic action of the wheels. Snowmobiles are on ice with skis and treads, so they’re much less stable, and they’re doing 70-100 mph with 1000cc engines. Did I say the treads are spiked? This is a sport where there are almost as many injured spectators as participants. Wicked pissah.