A couple friends of mine have a surplus card catalog as a very organized stuff-holder. Each drawer holds 'old glasses' 'rubber bands' 'twist ties' 'more glasses' et cetera.

We did this in sixth grade, with no idea what the secret dropper stuff was (okay, the kids whose older siblings had been through already knew, but the rest of us stayed skeptical). We dropped the soap straight onto the drops, too. The teacher tried to use clear dish soap, but only Sunlight worked when he tried it. We spent a little while afterward figuring out how it worked.

I wouldn't say 'alternatively', Travelina-- do both! A green roof is on the list of things to do when I have my own house. I have a lot of friends who want to work in green roofs, and I am such a gardening nerd.

Pnutts, the issue is the names-- the default Doll Family is white, thus showing that without modifiers, all people are white. "Ethnic" describes... nothing, really, unless you consider 'white' to be not an ethnicity. It's like 'exotic'-- oh, Costa Rica is such an exotic place! Except for the people who live there, who see it as just as non-exotic as I see Iowa.

A note: we can't assume a damned thing about whether this man is genetically female. Could be XX, could be XXY missing the SRY bit, could be XY missing the SRY bit, could be just plain X, could be a chimera-- what would that mean for those who say that he is a woman and has to admit that, if tests were done and it was found that the reproductive structures were genetically different from the brain? Could be intersex of some sort, though I think the article would mention that. We can't say he's genetically a woman; I can't say I'm genetically XX either.

At Wiscon a couple years ago, I heard a panel on sex, gender, various issues pertaining to nonbinary systems, and the subject of historical transgender people came up. There was a book or something about being transgender before it was possible to change the body, and how some people didn't want to change their sex even when it became possible... but lived as if they had. Sex is biology, gender is society*. There's Elizabeth Bear's "This Tragic Glass" with kind of the same situation.

*hey look another false dichotomy.

Well, a good Sean Connery voice forgives many things.

I think the difference in our analogies depends on how closely we feel titles describe ourselves. I will, if nothing goes horribly wrong and a few things go wondrously right, be a Dr in a few years. This doesn't mean much to me right now. I have friends who are Mrs, friend who are Mr, friends who are Ms. The titles don't matter; they're fluid anyway. I expect to change titles.
But I have seen a lot of anger over calling people the right name. My mother is not, and never has been, Mrs John Surname. My brother is J* M*, not and never J*, even if it took yelling at his teachers-- because they have to get his name right, at least. My sister's name is similar to other, more common girls' names, but she does not look kindly on being called any of them (one strike against my grandfather's wife is that she has never once pronounced it correctly).

Of course, in Germany, titles matter much more. Difference in background.

See, AnnoyedCapitalist, that's kind of what I meant. You are being rude because it has been pointed out to you that you made a faux pas. That does not excuse your rudeness. Having been presented with a person who considers himself male, is legally male, and uses a male pronoun, you insist upon calling him 'she'.
As you said, a polite person would comply with the correct pronouns.

If someone refers to me using male pronouns, I will correct that person once. Any further need for correction is either intentional and malicious or insensitivity, and neither speaks well of those who need it. I consider myself female. I am legally female. I use female pronouns.

I don't think that the Dr/Prof analogy holds up very well. It may be more analogous to a woman not taking her husband's surname, and always being called that by his family-- of course she's a Smith now, she married a Smith! That the family refuses to use her actual name is rude and demeaning.
It doesn't work entirely; gender is closer to most people than surname.

AnnoyedCapitalist, what you may have done in ignorance, others do with malice. Having been corrected, it would behoove you to remain so.

On a related note, is there a preferred pronoun cue I can learn to figure out what to use? Dress doesn't always help, nor hair, nor physical appearance. Is there a polite way to ask in an ambiguous situation?

A friend of mine has seen a washer something like this-- rinse water went into a tub next to the washer and was reused for the wash cycle of the next load. It cut down on water use pretty significantly. When I'm in a position to buy a washer, I'll probably look for and/or cobble together something like that.

Bitch PhD had a post about this-- I didn't realize that the students disrupted traffic, but it makes sense that it would happen.

After the students voted, more polling places were opened in that county. I don't know if any of them were on the campus.

This is also interesting in the historical context; Bitch posted that this is the college that eventually made it so college students can register where they go to school, rather than being absentee where their parents live.

I'm in favor of this, if for no other reason than it's people voting. If the county puts polling places far away from people, the county has to deal with people getting to them.

I was confused for a moment with women/woman too. It changes the post-- if there is one single woman who collects fake babies, it could be either sad or postmodern in some way. If there's an entire group of them, it's probably mostly sad with a side of creepy. It's clear from the use of the plural in the post that it's a group of women, not a single one, but the headline is what sticks in people's minds most of the time.

No, that's the difference between an *oboe* and a bassoon. Or violin and viola. Potentially oboe and English horn.
Bassoons are so much fun. I miss it.

When I was in high school, our orchestra played a medley of James Bond music. While the strings were doing their thing, the brass section went wild. Trumpets were pistols, trombones were pistols and occasionally rifles, and the tuba won.

Futurpunk, you could try Clarion, Odyssey, or Viable Paradise. Then become an awesome writer, publish a lot, and *teach* Alpha.

I'm actually more intrigued by the ants they were studying before they found the berry-butts-- the ones that fall off a tree and glide back to the trunk so they don't have to walk back. Is the gliding the result of random flailing, like the run-and-tumble of bacterial chemotaxis? Do ants hit the tree more than randomly? Is it reflex or driven by muscles rather than nerves?

Jeff, I expect the ants are doing their best to fight off the nematode. It's a bit analogous to sickness in humans-- "why would natural selection lead to a virus infecting our cells, using their machinery to make tons of new virions, and killing the cells in its quest to reproduce? Why don't our cells fight back?" Well, the cells do fight back; we have an immune system that does its best to kill the virus or ameliorate its attack. The ant's immune system tries to kill the nematode at some point during its invasion, but once it's really far alonge, the ant has lost and becomes birdfood.

Thank you, Progosk, for catching the intelligence thing. That was going to bug me all day if I didn't comment. It doesn't take intelligence to produce complexity.

That's an interesting idea. Instead of skipping over a comment or getting angry, just forcibly ignoring. I can see that there might be a use for it, though like any tool, it's not for all jobs.

Also, she's the one holding the knife.

He doesn't look scared at all to me. She looks a bit anxious, but it may be that she's just gotten married and is trying not to cry while pictures are going on.

My impression was that the room wasn't the source of the mold-- the entire house was full of it, just not where it would be seen. The note seemed to explain that the problem was not isolated to the room. It looked more analogous to falling down a well you didn't know was there and finding a note saying, "Hi there, just so you know, this system of caves runs under the entire house, and it may fall down at any moment."

I've not understood CoinStars for a while. My bank does the same thing with no surcharge. When my change gets baggie-sized, I pull out all the quarters for laundry and take it in.

I really must find this anthology-- I know a few bee people who read and write SFF, and it seems like an interesting idea.

It makes sense to me-- when I was that age, my friends and I played something like two games and Paintbrush on their computer. If we'd had a button or something instead of putting in disks, we would have saved a lot of time. If your computer does only a few things, it makes sense to have shortcut buttons. It's when your computer becomes a window to a branching tree of other stuff to do that you want a generalized input apparatus.

Those are fun. I like the one with the QWERTY keyboard stretched across one long row at the top.

Dvorak is hard to explain. I switch back and forth, but greatly prefer Dvorak-- it just feels better. Even if I typed more slowly, I'd like it better; I'm willing to trade a few words per minute to make those words feel less spidery. Like I said above, it's kind of like switching to a Spanish layout for Spanish writing. I'm willing to trade habitual knowledge of the " for the ability to type accents and proper punctuation.

Switching to QWERTY now--
this is not nearly as fun. I'm able to touchtype still, with a few little quirks like Y and B being offset by only a key. But I'm reaching a lot more, and I keep realizing that my hands are nowhere near the home row because all the letters I need are above. My hands move more (I'm not going to quantify it) and it seems like half of my right hand could be missing entirely without any problem.

And back to Dvorak. Three words' switching trouble, mostly at the beginning of the words before my muscle memory kicked in. My hands are moving much less, I'm using both of them instead of mostly my left, and... it just feels better.

I know that's not a convincing argument, but it's what I have. If you like QWERTY, keep QWERTY. If you like another layout, use that one. Do what works for you, but don't dismiss options unnecessarily.

I switched to Dvorak some years ago, because everyone at Forward Motion was doing it and I am somewhat a sheep. It works really well-- I lost a bit of comfort with QWERTY but can switch back and forth pretty easily, except that QWERTY feels *weird*. It's so stretchy-outy, and I'm always reaching for things. I spend a great deal of time typing, and even if I'm not any faster with Dvorak, it feels better. It's kind of like switching to a Spanish keyboard for Spanish writing-- the keyboard layout does what I need it to do *better*.
There's a silly game I played a lot to learn Dvorak. It didn't take too long (it took me a semester in seventh grade to learn QWERTY, and less to learn Dvorak) and hey, fun game. It did slow my thoughts down a little while writing or chatting, but no more than learning to touch-type did the first time around.
The only problems with Dvorak are that I have to switch my computer if anyone at work wants to use it-- home's even worse, since I have QWERTY, Dvorak, and Spanish on there, but I'm the only one who uses it-- and that sometimes, if I'm typing a lab report, the ctrlshift= and ctrl= for superscripts and subscripts will slip and I'll switch keyboards again.

In years past, there's been a guy at my county fair who does work like this, and more elaborate (if smaller) pieces. You could probably find a glassblower of some sort and have a cephalopod commissioned.

Is this the solution? If a Best Weblog vote becomes Who Can Get The Most Less-Interested People Who May Or May Not Read To Vote, it's pretty much an exposure contest-- you want your ad to get lots of people who probably don't read your blog to begin with. I'm not sure fighting fire with fire is the right way to go about this. It's not a wrong way, necessarily, but part of me would be more interested in making explicit that when a contest becomes this type of thing, it's pretty meaningless. Allowing the methodology to be flawed because we* can sometimes win* is not as good as fixing the problem.

*not the words I want, not a gladiatorial combat, etc

I tried to post this earlier, but failed. Alas!

What interests me is what the active compound could be-- not methane, because if methane were hallucinogenic on this level, people would use gas stoves. I would not at this point rule out that something interesting could potentially happen in wastewater; caffeine and other recreational drugs are used as markers in many cities. You can estimate the number of people over time according to the anthropogenic chemicals in the wastewater. I don't think anything ferments to something interesting, not under the conditions we use to treat wastewater, but given the variety of chemicals present in there to begin with, who knows what could happen.
Pure speculation, of course. And here's more: might the hallucinogenic effects be due to something non-biological in the wastewater? Industrial contaminants fermenting in light and/or anaerobic conditions to produce gaseous compounds?

The general importance of Us isn't going to change much; if you take all of Animalia and weight just the humans, just the vertebrates, just the deuterostomes, it comes out pretty much the same.
This graph is even cooler when you look at the shapes of the branches-- the prokaryotes have a lot more of that, which means a lot more ways of being.

At my high school, the big thing with prom was the vehicle-- it was what people talked about the next week. Future EMTs borrowed ambulances, firetrucks, et cetera; furniture trucks, old cars, new cars, shopping carts; one guy's father built a rickshaw and pulled it. This would have been completely awesome.

That's a good point, Robotech. Possession is fine (my aunt keeps some relatives on the closet shelf) but it's illegal to sell organs, which I have seen interpreted to include human hair. I'm not sure how this intersects with Locks of Love and being paid for plasma, but there might be a case there.

Neither of the two people looks very happy at all. The mother is dissatisfied with her shopping options, and the father is worried about their budget. Even the narrator is unenthusiastic.
Am I spoiled by seeing films where the future is wonderful and everyone breaks into song?