The Blinne Blog

He's Dead Jim

In yesterday's Denver Post was a report on the loss of members of the largest Presbyterian denomination, the PCUSA. In the dead tree version of the paper the obituary section was on the opposite page.

The Presbyterian Church (USA) has been losing 20,000 to 25,000 members a year for several years. But last year, for reasons unknown, the church lost 40,000 people, said Keith Wulff, research coordinator for the church's General Assembly Council.

Colorful Terms Used by Physicists

In last week's Science:

Brown muck

Consider a particle called the B meson, which consists of a heavy bottom quark and a light up or down antiquark. Crudely speaking, the quark and antiquark are bound by gluons like two bricks held together with a little mortar. In reality, however, the meson is far more complex. The gluons themselves exchange gluons to form a roiling tangle. And thanks to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, quark-antiquark pairs constantly pop into and out of existence, adding to the complexity of the mess surrounding the bottom quark, which goes by the technical term "brown muck."

Brown muck??!?? Never, ever, ever let a physicist in your marketing department.

Congratulations, Hope!

Hope participated in the PR-1 District Elementary Track meet in the 50m and 100m dashes, and the shot put. She placed 3rd in the 50m and 2nd in 100m for her heats. The 100m was very close. A true "photo finish". Enclosed are pictures.

French Joke

A joke posted by Merde in France that's making the rounds in France.

Jacques Chirac visits President George Bush. - Tell me George how do you put together such a efficient team while I'm assisted by a bunch of morons.

- Simple Jack, I constantly test my cabinet Secretaries. If they respond correctly, they stay on. Otherwise I fire them. It's a 'best of breed' process, I'm sure of keeping only the smartest ones.

Bush then calls Powell.

- Colin, I'm going to ask you a question. You know the rules. If you're wrong, you're fired. OK? Here we go:

- It is your mother's child, but it's neither your brother or your sister. Who is it?

Colin Powell thinks for a few seconds and then answers:

- That's easy. It's me!

- Perfect, Bush says, you stay on.

Chirac is very impressed. As soon as he gets back to Paris he calls on Raffarin (Prime Minister).

- Raffarin, I'm going to ask you a question. If you answer correctly, you stay on as Prime Minister. If not, you're fired. Here it is: it is your mother's child, but it's neither your brother or your sister. Who is it?

Raffarin, aware of his own shortcomings, requests a brief delay to think it over. Chirac gives him 24 hours. Raffarin rushes back to his palace, calls his cabinet ministers, and soon a group of senior civil service mandarins are studying the question. All of the possible outcomes are covered. After several hours of study, a guy more clever than the rest says:

- We must ask JuppeHe's always right and he knows what the President has on his mind. Great idea! Raffarin immediately places a call to Juppe

- Hello Alain? It's Raffarin. Chirac wants an answer to this question and since you know him so well you can find the answer.

The question is: It is your mother's child, but it's neither your brother or your sister. Who is it?

Right away, Juppe snickers slightly and with his well known superior attitude responds:

- That's easy, it's me.

The next day Raffarin rushes to the Presidential Palace.

- President Sir, President Sir, I know who it is!

- OK, OK, Raffarin. So, your mother's child who is neither your brother or your sister, who is it?

- It's Juppe President Sir.

Chirac's eyes bulge wide open.

- Pack your bags Raffarin. The correct answer is Colin Powell!!!!!

Klingon Interpreter Needed for Oregon Mental Patients

If ever William Shatner's famous "Get a life!" quote applies it does to this story:

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Position Available: Interpreter, must be fluent in Klingon. The language created for the Star Trek TV series and movies is one of about 55 needed by the office that treats mental health patients in metropolitan Multnomah County. "We have to provide information in all the languages our clients speak," said Jerry Jelusich, a procurement specialist for the county Department of Human Services, which serves about 60,000 mental health clients. Although created for works of fiction, Klingon was designed to have a consistent grammar, syntax and vocabulary. And now Multnomah County research has found that many people -- and not just fans -- consider it a complete language. "There are some cases where we've had mental health patients where this was all they would speak," said the county's purchasing administrator, Franna Hathaway. County officials said that obligates them to respond with a Klingon-English interpreter, putting the language of starship Enterprise officer Worf and other Klingon characters on a par with common languages such as Russian and Vietnamese, and less common tongues including Dari and Tongan.

Your Words Betray You

In the 25 April 2003 issue of Science was this interesting article about bayesian filters detecting the gender of authors. I wonder what it would have done with the works of George Sand?

That headline contains the tip-off: This was written by a woman. The clues? It.s in the present tense, contains pronouns, and addresses the audience directly, says computer scientist Shlomo Argamon. Argamon and his co-workers at Bar-Ilahn University in Ramat Gan, Israel, have put together a computer program, called Winnow, that they claim can figure out an author.s sex by his or her writing style. Winnow has taught itself, through extensive reading, to recognize linguistic patterns more commonly used by one or the other sex and has formed rules based on patterns of word usage and sentence structure. Women use words such as .for,. .with,.and .and . more often than men, signifying their more communal tendencies, says Argamon. Men are more quantitative and use more .determiners,. such as .an,. .a,. and .no.. The program.s overall success rate, published last year in Literary and Linguistic Computing, was 80% in identifying the sex of authors of British works including fiction and writing in the arts, sciences, and social sciences. In a total of 264 fictional works, the authors of six were misidentified. A.S. Byatt was the only woman who wrote like a man; five male authors, including Michael Frayn, sound like women, according to Winnow. Even on 30 science texts, with their formal technical style, it scored 74%. .If I had asked you before you saw this, my bet would be that you would have thought there.d be no [gender] difference in nonfiction,. says Dan Roth, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The researchers will lay out further results in the August issue of Text.

SARS Data Online for All

AAAS posted the sequence data for the SARS virus here. They also promised to put updated information at this web site. This is freely available to anyone and does not require a AAAS membership. I am glad that my AAAS dues are going towards something of value. Let's hope this kind of cooperative work will continue.

It's Not Dead Yet

Reuters is reporting that the anti-war movement is not dead:

Anti-War Activists Say Their Cause Is Not Dead

By Niala Boodhoo
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration may say major military combat in Iraq is over, but U.S. anti-war activists say their fight is not.

Oh yeah? Time for a Monte Python response:

"This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot!"