Peter

There's a classic example sentence he has, "Colourless[1] green ideas sleep furiously", which he holds up as an example of grammatical gibberish, and the contrasting "furiously sleep ideas green colourless", which is an example of ungrammatical gibberish. The difference between nonsense and word salad, if you like.

However, I've realised that you can add punctuation, and get "Furiously sleep ideas green, Colourless!", which is grammatical, and you could even imaging a hypothetical scenario for it. That scenario would probably be an MMO, a bit like World of Warcraft. The interpretation goes as follows:

"sleep" has a transitive sense, meaning "to cast a sleep spell on". Once you know this it's obvious that the sentence is an imperative sentence, and everything else falls into place quite quickly. To sleep ideas green is presumably to repeatedly cast the sleep spell on the ideas (presumably mobs called "ideas" - stranger things exist in WoW) until they turn green - after all, you can shout yourself hoarse. Presumably this is best done in a furious manner. And, well, people can have all sorts of bonkers handles in MMOs, so Colourless is not nearly as crazy as some I've seen.

In fact this all feels less strained than coming up with a good scenario for the allegedly more grammatical reverse statement.

[1] This was probably actually "colorless", but whatever...

Newton and the Counterfeiter, Thomas Levenson

Some nice light historical reading, the nonfictional counterpart to Neal Stevenson's Baroque Cycle, but one sensible-sized paperback and not three bricks. The counterfeiter is William Chaloner, who seemed to have amazing amounts of chutzpah and persistence, and kept coming up with all sorts of crazy criminal schemes.

One interesting thing seems to be that hunting counterfeiters was something that Newton needed to be pushed into. His post as Warden of the Mint was a sinecure, and it was a bit of a surprise to all concerned when he actually applied himself to the problem of getting the mint to run at the capacity needed to recoin all the silver in circulation. However, during this someone pointed out that the Warden was meant to be in charge of investigating and prosecuting counterfeiters - this was something Newton didn't want to do, but his arm was twisted, and he turned out to be good at it.

I've got a nice set of expensive headphones, with a problem - the left headphone has gone very quiet. They're not cheap to replace, but they do have a detachable cable, so I suspect the problem might be with that. Before I go and buy one, does anyone have a headphone cable I could borrow for diagnostic purposes?

Units quiz

It's a BBC science quiz - I got 9/9, although some of those were intelligent (or lucky) guesses or deduction-by-elimination rather than by directly knowing the right answer.

No, not alternate realities, actual dimensions of things. A 2x4 is useful for hitting people with, and of course everyone should know the significance of 1x4x9. But surely there are others that I can't think of...

ETA: OK, there are lots of things which are kind of one dimensional. But how about things which are 2D or 3D like the examples above (or tim's example)?

...adrift at sea, nothing but ocean all the way to the horizon in every direction, no supplies, no hope of rescue, not even a proper lifeboat, just some driftwood lashed together, and only a distinctly taciturn Protoss for company.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you Stark Raft.

(or maybe not, actually writing the story would be too much like effort)

Woman repels bear armed only with a courgette - you know you're a geek when you think "thank $DEITY the bear only had a courgette. If it was armed with a chainsaw there'd be real trouble"

Happy birthday emperor!

Which reminds me, equinox tomorrow. I looked it up, it's at 03:09 UTC, which I guess is when the sun checks into the southern hemisphere, somewhere to the east of Indonesia, I think. Or in less anthropomorphic, geocentric terms, when the equator crosses the line from the centre of the sun to the centre of the Earth, with the intersection being somewhere to the east of Indonesia.

Anyway, the rate at which the days (in the (shrinking regions of the) northern hemisphere (where they still have days)) will be getting shorter will start slowing down, so we have that to celebrate. Or if you like darkness, it's soon going to be the dark half of the year. Either way, it's good news.