Can't think of a title for this post

Retired guy hitting keys at random in Google search, just a few and ENTER. Then again. And repeat. I think no matter what keys you hit, Goo can find a match. My brain, too, can inexplicably find matches: After half a dozen randoms I had half a thought and typed old information. No idea what my thought was.

Second (among 12.01 billion results) was

Old Information before New - MIT

MIT? I couldn't resist! Here's what I got:

Not earth-shaking. Obvious, if you ever thought about it before. Helpful if you didn't. Probably useful either way.

That little tidbit is part of The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing. Maybe I'll see you there.

"Biggest Member" Event of the Year

Alternatively:

Biggest
Member Event
of the Year

Mollifying America

I'm in the middle of something important here -- drinking coffee and making graphs -- but I have to interrupt myself because Old Mother Google is at it again. "It’s almost Drug Take Back Day":

They offer social insights like that, far too often. If they're gonna do that, they need a button on their search page so you can send them a message: WHAT ARE YOU, MY MOTHER? And if it's so damned important, why do we have to wait four days to take the stuff back? It's all nonsense and gibberish dressed up like little red riding hood.

They seem to want to play the Walter Cronkite role, mollifying America with their little one-liners.

I'm not mollified. I'm horrified. And I think it's creepy.

You'll probably focus on today's creepy message and say It's good they're concerned about drugs. Sure. Whatever. But shouldn't it be "It’s almost Drug Take-Back Day", with a hyphen in there? You know, a dash...?

I'm not complaining that they're concerned about drugs. I'm complaining that they are wearing it on their sleeve. Uh, excuse me a moment, I have to check something...

Yeah, that. "On the sleeve".

And yes, it was google I checked with, the one I'm complaining about, about the "on the sleeve" thing. That's part of the irony of what's going on here.

The other part of the irony is that the google search page DOES NOT HAVE beliefs, values, emotions, or sentiments. I'm just dealing with the search page, not with the people who work at google. Yes, I'm sure the people who work there have beliefs and values and emotions and all that shit. That's not the point.

I'm sure there is a whole department at google where it's their job to deal with Beliefs and Emotions and Values and Sentiments -- the BEVS department.  But what that means is, it's their job. The shit we see on our screen, those one-line BEVS, it's not from the heart. It's just their job.

Sure: Lots of those people care about lots of those issues. But not ALL of them care about ALL of those issues. So why do they expect ME to care about all of those issues? And why do you object so strongly when I happen to complain about one of their one-liners?

Me? I don't even use the word "issues". STOP PUTTING THAT SHIT ON MY SCREEN. Go to church and pray about it. Or donate money. Or volunteer your time. Do what the fuck you want, but stop putting that shit on my screen.

//

See? It wasn't about drugs, was it.

Keyword: "since"

Old cop: "I haven't laughed since my wife died."

New partner: "Why did you laugh when your wife died?"


From A Touch of Cloth (copshow parody) Season 1 Episode 1.
On Britbox or Acorn TV maybe, on Amazon Prime.

A gardening tip

They say "it prefers partial to full shade". Do they mean "it prefers partial shade to full shade", or do they mean "it prefers partial *or* full shade (as opposed to full sun)" ??

To me the words mean the first of those, but I think they mean the second.

To me, it's still not really a word

Again with the soaker hoses

Apparently, you need or may need lots of special fittings for a soaker hose installation: backflow preventer, pressure regulator, filter, maybe more. I've been reading up. At one site they say

Always ensure that the hose is kink free as this will block water flow.

Yeah, I know what they mean. They mean that a kink will block the water flow. But what they say is that a kink-free hose will block the water flow.

I like careless writing like that because it is often funny. But I pay attention to careless writing like that because I want my writing to be most careful.

The latest (and greatest!) in multi-language labeling

Lookin for some "soaker hoses" to help me water my landscape & garden plants. I found a good one at Northern Tool. Below the image of the hose they ask: "What do you think of our product images?" Kind of an odd question, no? So I looked at the blowup of the package:

I'm too old to think highly of the multi-language product labeling that is so common nowadays. But this Gilmour label is certainly one I can live with.

Every time I mow the lawn I think of this

Your choice: Avoid Serious Injury or Death -- but not both!

If you've done even a little computer programming, you should already know what I'm going to tell you about AND and OR. If we're talking about two things, like "serious injury" and "death", and we say "serious injury and death" we mean BOTH of those things. But if we say "serious injury or death", we mean just one of them, one or the other. That's what the words "and" and "or" do.

So when the sticker on your lawn mower says avoid serious injury "or" death, they are saying PICK THE ONE YOU WANT TO AVOID.

If they want you to avoid BOTH serious injury AND death, then they should say "avoid serious injury and death".

Does it matter? Not if you're dead, I guess.

It matters to me, because I want to take something that somebody said and evaluate it. The guy said

"Periods of excessive leverage, rapid credit growth, or buoyant credit market sentiment increase the risk to economic growth."

Notice the word "or" in that sentence. The word "or" means that any one of the three things will "increase the risk to economic growth." Of course, if any one of them is a problem, then all three of them together are a problem, sure.

But if the guy specifically meant to say that the combination of all three together is the problem, then he needed to use "and" rather than "or" in that sentence:

"Periods of excessive leverage, rapid credit growth, and buoyant credit market sentiment increase the risk to economic growth."

In this case, the sentence means (or could mean) it's a problem when all three things happen, but not if only one of them happens, or two out of three.

Because the guy used the word "or", I take him to mean that any one of the three things will "increase the risk to economic growth." And I want to argue against that, because it's not always true and the exception is an important one.

But I'm not sure he really meant that any one of the three is a problem, because maybe he used "or" when he should have used "and". It is a common mistake.

But it would sure be a pity if the economy went bad because somebody said "or".

Not yes

From the Private Debt page at Prestige Funds:

Private debt involves the lending activity carried out by entities other than banks. This can include both Peer to Peer lending as well as lending by more specialised entities and companies that focus on particular segments of the economy.

Well, I have to interrupt my train of thought to say debt is not lending: "private debt" is not "lending activity". It is not "borrowing activity" either. Debt is not an activity.

It seems that people with money to lend, who want to avoid going thru banks, now engage in "private lending". And, incidentally, to undermine the arguments of the many people who say excessive 'private' (as opposed to 'public') debt is a big problem for our economy, they have decided to call private lending activity "private debt". They've redefined the term "private debt" in a way that makes all prior concern about private debt irrelevant.

But I don't mean to talk about that here. I'm talking about it elsewhere. My topic here is the second sentence in the Prestige Funds quote, the one that begins "This can include both..." but I figure you might not know what the "this" refers to if I don't say. Especially since they are changing the meanings of words.

Enough of that! Focus with me on part of their second sentence:

This can include both Peer to Peer lending as well as lending by more specialised entities...

Why do people think they have to say both X as well as Y? Where the hell did that come from? If you say "both X and Y" it means both X and Y. Or you could omit the "both" and say X as well as Y. That would also mean both X and Y. Isn't it obvious?

What do they think "both X and Y" means? What do they think "X as well as Y" means? Why do they think they should merge those phrases? Drives me nuts.

What I'm thinkin is, it's like a double-negative. Only it's not negation, it's inclusion, so "both X as well as Y" is a double inclusion. Would that mean exclusion, the way a double negative means not no? I don't really think so, but I'm sure the people who use it have no idea.


Both this as well as that?

No.

What does that mean?

From an abstract, at ScienceAdvances:

Our multilevel, time-lagged regressions also indicate that tolerance for individual rights predicted 20th century economic growth even better than secularization.

What does that mean? Does it mean that tolerance predicted growth "even better than secularization predicted growth" or "even better than tolerance predicted secularization" ?

I could probably go back to the source, read it more carefully, and figure out what they mean. But if the reader has to do that, the writer is not doing his job.

To "other" or not to "other", that is the question

On ABC's This Week (5 May 2019) during the "powerhouse roundtable" somebody said Biden "is polling 20 points higher than any of his other competitors".

Other competitors? Other than who -- himself? But Biden is not one of Biden's competitors, duh.

This works:
"Biden is polling 20 points higher than any of his competitors."
So leave it.

"Write regularly"

Found this image among a page of quotes from Arnold J Toynbee at StoreMyPic.com

And not only history-writing

Mortimer Chambers, in the Introduction to The Fall of Rome: Can It Be Explained?

History-writing is explanation. That alone distinguishes it from the mere collecting of facts, accurately dated and lucidly described, in the form of chronicles. The difference between a "historian" and a "chronicler" -- between, let us say, Thucydides and Livy in ancient historiography -- is commonly attributed to the historian's deeper inquiry into causation, into the progress and change of events, and into the question Why?

I like that. But in Making them up as I go I say: "Don't explain. Just tell a story." It seems a contradiction.

By "Don't explain" I mean "Don't get bogged down in explanation". I could go on...

You know

Tim Duy quotes Fed Chairman Powell:

It’s a major challenge. It’s one of the major challenges of our time, really, to have inflation, you know, downward pressure on inflation let’s say. It gives central banks less room to, you know, to respond to downturns, right. So, if inflation expectations are below two percent, they’re always going to be pulling inflation down, and we’re going to be paddling upstream and trying to, you know, keep inflation at two percent, which gives us some room to cut, you know, when it’s time to cut rates when the economy weakens. And, you know, that’s something that central banks face all over the world, and we certainly face that problem too. It’s one of the, one of the things we’re looking into is part of our strategic monetary policy review this year. The proximity to the zero lower bound calls for more creative thinking about ways we can, you know, uphold the credibility of our inflation target, and you know, we’re openminded about ways we can do that.