Friday Hodgepodge
Friday, February 09, 2018
Four Things
1. The coals to Newcastle aspect of this story isn't really that remarkable, but I think the following is:
With rising crude exports and already booming overseas sales of refined petroleum products such as gasoline, the U.S. net oil imports have plunged to below 3 million barrels a day, the lowest since data available starting 45 years ago, compared with more than 12 million barrels a day in 2006. The U.S. could become a net petroleum exporter by 2029, the EIA said this week.Three cheers for fracking.
2. Has someone finally produced a tablet for the inveterate taker of notes on paper? I was initially ambivalent after reading this Gizmodo article on the "reMarkable," but the following comment from a Hacker News thread has me intrigued:
Some cool facts about the device from a hacker point of view:In other words, while the tablet may be pricey at the moment, and it might seem limited on its own, there is no dependence on a single device or a "walled garden" around the data it generates. Assuming the writing is as natural as the review suggests, this could make it really easy to enjoy the benefits of paper note taking and digitization all at once.
[format edits, notes omitted, bold added]
- Main developer/CTO is a KDE dev and very open source-friendly.
- You get root access to the device out of the box.
- The device is running a mainline kernel with minimal patches, which have a good chance at being upstreamed.
- The toolchain is open. They use vanilla QT/QML and people have already built simple example apps.
- There's an unofficial Linux client which works just fine.
- Desktop client and device run the same code, so you can just sync the files locally without connecting the device to the internet. Works both ways (it's the setup I use).
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| Image via Pixabay. |
4. And speaking of crawfish, here's a map of what Americans call those delectable freshwater crustaceans. I actually called them "crawdads" when I was very young, despite being a Mississippian. The map suggests a possible explanation: My mother came from Arkansas, and her mother from Missouri, where that term is more common.
-- CAV
4 comments:
Yo, Gus, you write: "And speaking of crawfish, here's a map of what Americans call those delectable freshwater crustaceans. I actually called them "crawdads" when I was very young, despite being a Mississippian. The map suggests a possible explanation: My mother came from Arkansas, and her mother from Missouri, where that term is more common."
Curious. I called them crawdads and crayfish second, central Texas a bit north of Waco and the Hill Country. Note though that the coloration shows gradations, which suggests a slight majority in use, not exclusive use.
Here's one right back atcha: What do you call Armadilidiidae: "Pill bugs," "doodle bugs," or "roly polies"? (When I was littler, I didn't distinguish "sow bugs" and "pill bugs" in speech even though I did know their differences in actual fact. About age 13 I learned the difference and also learned the term "woodlouse" covering both. I find some people even at age 40 still don't distinguish sow bugs and pill bugs.) For me, "doodle bug" was the technical term and "roly poly" was the slang term; I mostly thought of them as dry-land latter-day trilobites, actually.
Turns out they have so many different names you'd think they were secret agents or something. "The name's Bug. Pill Bug."
Snedcat,
I'm sure your're right about the shading. I'm also trying unsuccessfully to remember what my father's mother called them, since she'd encourage us to try to catch crawfish from the ditch in front of her house when we came over. She was from Mississippi and may have called them crawdads.
Regarding woodlice, I called them roly-polies, and only learned of the proper name and numerous variants much later. I'm unclear what you mean by knowing the difference between sow- and pill bugs, but I remember noticing that there were some "roly polies" that couldn't form a ball. It didn't occur to me then that they were a different kind of animal.
Gus
"I'm unclear what you mean by knowing the difference between sow- and pill bugs, but I remember noticing that there were some "roly polies" that couldn't form a ball. It didn't occur to me then that they were a different kind of animal."
Yes, they're both woodlice, but the ones that don't roll up are a different species, I gather, and they are sow bugs.
Ah. It was which ones were sow bugs -- since I never used the term -- I wasn't sure about.
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