Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
My week of Monday 29 July to Sunday 4 August 2019 was week four of being on Health Patrol for my friend, and progress has been good. It also heralded a return to productivity — until that stopped dead.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 479: Human health improves, computer health declines”
We’ve survived the first year of the Trump presidency, and isn’t it wonderful! But America isn’t looking so good in the eyes of the rest of the world. And here in Australia, Senator Eric Abetz is swimming upstream to spawn.
In this episode there’s talk of Donald Trump, dumplings, stupid people, landlords, disinformation, and the blockchain. Amongst many other things. And Nicholas Fryer takes a look through The Arch Window.
Continue reading “The 9pm Glorious Cloaca”
US defence analysts can’t trust their own president. Senator Malcolm Roberts takes us to his happy place. And an old woman explains where the homosexuals come from.
There’s also talk of Donald Trump, The Orb, racism, government incompetence, Pauline Hanson, and a giraffe. And of course Nicholas Fryer with a look through The Arch Window.
Continue reading “The 9pm Courting Disaster”
My week of Monday 14 to Sunday 20 March 2016 was pretty much as planned, though slightly more tiring than I’d hoped.
Right now I’m more in the mood to listen to the rain outside than write, so I’ll leave it there.
None. But scroll down for details of a new episode of The 9pm Edict in just a few days.
None.
I’m spending the short work week before Easter in Lilyfield, in Sydney’s inner west, as well as Easter itself. I’ll be working steadily through three geek-for-hire projects, catching up a big chunk of that bookkeeping for the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), and writing a ZDNet column.
On Wednesday night, I’m finally recording and streaming that episode of The 9pm Edict podcast. That’s at 2100 AEDT on this website. Details will be posted on Monday.
That much-delayed episode of The 9pm Edict podcast will be produced and posted over the weekend. The recording won’t be streamed live, for a number of reasons, though I might stream the finished podcast at a specific time so you can enjoy it together.
The short week after Easter will be an extension of the plan just described. So will the following week, at least at this stage.
After that, I should be in Canberra on 12-14 April for the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Conference. A plan is slowly evolving.
I’ll definitely be on the Gold Coast on 24-27 May for the AusCERT Cyber Security Conference.
Update 23 March 2016: Edited to reflect changed plans.
[Photo: Old Target. Today I found one of the National Rifle Association regulation practice targets that I used when I went to American Shooters, a firearms range in Las Vegas, in 2011. I think I need some more practice.]
In last night’s episode, titled The 9pm Inadequate Sense of Occasion, there were three things which may not have been entirely clear. Let’s deal with those issues right now.
One, I failed to identify a commentator I quoted, someone who’d given their opinion of America’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Two, my description of a bolt bomb was misleading. Three, I may not have been entirely clear in expressing my opinion of Australia’s Attorney-General.
Continue reading “The 9pm Supplementary Sense of Occasion”
I cringe when people talk about the “train station”. “It’s ‘railway station’, you morons,” screams my brain. Well as it turns out, they’re actually not stupid — at least not for that reason. It’s just another relatively modern shift in language.
The chart at the top of the post is a Google Ngram search of their entire English corpus since 1820 — the first public steam railway in the world was the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which opened in 1825 — comparing the usage of “railway station” (blue) versus “railroad station” (red) and “train station” (orange).
You can click through to the full-size chart, or run the search yourself.
As you can see, the most common usage has almost always been “railway station”, with “railroad station” distinctly second-place. A “train station” wasn’t even a thing until the 1950s, but it rose in popularity quite quickly. “Train station” has been the most common usage since the mid-1990s, although it has been declining again since around 2000. I wonder why.
My understanding is that many railway terms derived from the military, because until the railways came along nothing else had been organised on that sort of trans-national and even trans-continental scale except armies. Hence trains have “guards” for their safe operation, and “stations” along the line where staff are stationed to maintain the entire railway system — including fuel, water, trackwork and signalling.
Railway stations are therefore part of a railway’s entire operation, not merely “train stations” for trains to stop at. For me, someone talking about “train stations” is showing their ignorance of how railways work: it’s more than just the trains.
Since I had the Google open in front of me, I thought I’d look at the variations in US versus UK English. It seems that “railroad station” isn’t the dominant American usage that I’d imagined.
Continue reading “Why people who say “train station” sound stupid”