#fancy book learning

[drmonkeysetroscans]

Been there, done that.

[drmonkeysetroscans]

School.

[drmonkeysetroscans]

School.

[drmonkeysetroscans]

Am be our kids learnin,?

[drmonkeysetroscans]

Sit on it.

[wjt]

Are there other answers to the popular riddle?

There's a popular riddle which goes something like this:

Find a word that you change from singular to plural by adding a letter, and then change back to singular by adding the same letter again.

The canonical answer is the title of this post, but are there others? I did a little breakfast experiment channelling the power of Azure Notebooks, Python, WordNet and /usr/share/dict/words which you can look at if you're interested in the methodology. Here are the candidate answers I found:

a → ad → add

bra → bras → brass ★

care → cares → caress ★

employ → employe → employee

hi → his → hiss

ma → mas → mass

ma → mat → matt

me → mes → mess

needle → needles → needless ★

pa → pal → pall

pa → pas → pass

prince → princes → princess

I think the starred ones are plausible answers to the riddle, though "needless" is not a noun. If you accept "ma" and "pa" as terms for parents that can be made plural, then those ones work too, but I think that's a bit of a stretch.

[wjt]

📚 Do you want any of my books? 📚

I'm pruning my bookshelves, and all of the following books are free to a good home! All paperback unless otherwise noted. Happy to post them to UK-based strangers, too! (Books marked ✔ are spoken for.)

Fiction:

Gravitas and Gigapolis by S. Christopher – I remember this author being another pseudonym of chromatic, the notable Perl developer, though this page just describes them as a “friend and frequent collaborator”

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow – a signed copy I got when I joined the Open Rights Group

✔ The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle – a single hefty volume

✔ Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov

Borderliners by Peter Høeg – I think I read this off the back of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, which as I recall was better

The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

Neuromancer by William Gibson

✔ Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

Virtual Light and All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson – I read this trilogy backwards, which I don't recommend. I don't know what happened to my copy of the middle book, Idoru

✔ Etc Etc Amen by Howard Male – I think the edition I have predates a round of editing, so might be worth getting a fresh copy (with a cooler cover)

✔ Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark – I remember really enjoying this, but I am unlikely to re-read it and in hardback, at ~800 pages, it takes up a lot of space on the shelf!

✔ The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson – as if the charity shops of the land weren't overflowing with this one

Flux by Stephen Baxter – oh, now I see that this is the third in a series. That explains why I couldn't make head or tail of it

Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress – the first Kress novel I read. It's good!

Non-fiction:

✔ Attention All Shipping by Charlie Connelly

✔ Watching the English by Kate Fox

✔ Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent

✔ Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

✔ The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? by Paul Davies

Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity by David Allen – though really, if you were going to join this particular cult you would have done so by now

✔ The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen by Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw – I remember this being pretty good, it doesn't shy away from mathematics to help explain a concept. Hardback.

✔ The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex: What's Wrong with Modern Movies? by Mark Kermode – no Oxford comma in the title, it's dead to me

The Internet, Now In Handy Book Form¹ (and similar coffee-table books):

✔ The Internet is a Playground by David Thorne

✔ He Died With A Felafel In His Hand by John Birmingham

Diesel Sweeties: Pocket Sweeties Volume One and Crush All Hu-Mans: A Diesel Sweeties Treasury by R. Stevens

Garfield Minus Garfield by Jim Davis, Dan Walsh – it even has the subtitle “The Internet sensation–now in book form!”. Hardback.

✔ Cyanide And Happiness: I'm giving you the finger – Hardback.

The Book of Bunny Suicides and Return of the Bunny Suicides by Andy Riley – he gave a great (and totally unrelated) talk at Boring Conference in 2015. Hardback.

¹ I only just realised that there is a David McCandless book titled The Internet Now in Handy Book Form. Doesn't it sound terrible?

[wjt]

“Capitilized”

From Linux Kernel Development (paperback, second edition, pp. 145) by Robert Love:

To initialize a dynamically created mutex, you can use:

init_MUTEX(sem);

I do not know why the “mutex” in init_MUTEX() is capitilized [sic] or why the “init” comes first here but second in sema_init(). I do know, however, that it looks dumb and I apologize for the inconsistency.

I've mixed feelings about the tone of this book in general but this bit was very welcome. There's a certain irony in misspelling “capitalized” here, though.

I was curious how common that typo is, and the answer is: so rare that it does not appear in Google Ngram Viewer's corpus. “capitilize” is present but extremely rare.