darkoshi

I have this problem where I often spend too much time on certain activities, or researching certain subjects. More time than I had wanted, intended or planned for. Often, I hadn't planned to do the activity at all.

When this happens, I feel driven to continue the activity until completion, or until some point at which I am satisfied enough to stop. Usually, a part of me remembers that I had other plans, and am using up too much of my spare time for no good reason, and wants me to stop. But that's usually a small voice in the background of my mind, and not enough to actually make me stop.

.

Like this evening... I have a few boxes of old stale peanut butter crackers which I should either eat up or discard. They don't taste that great, so I haven't been eating them much. But I hate to waste "good" food. So I wonder, is it bad from a health standpoint, to eat stale peanut butter? If it is, that would be enough to convince me to throw them away.

I did a web search, and came across an old book from 1918 that says:
"When stale, peanut butter develops a decomposition substance known as acrolein, which is dangerous to children as well as adults".

I found no other sources which mention the same thing, so I don't suggest you take that statement as truth. I'm still not sure whether stale peanut butter is bad for you.

However, I was looking through the rest of the first book, and it is fascinating in a historical sense. I've spent way too much time reading through it.

The Science of Eating: How to Insure Stamina, Endurance, Vigor, Strength and Health in Infancy, Youth and Age - by Alfred W. McCann

100 years ago, there was the same concern as nowadays, about lack of nutrition in processed foods due to vitamins, minerals, and fiber having being stripped out. There was concern over high levels of glucose, sugar, and chemical additives. There was concern about cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis being caused by the substandard nutrition provided by those foods.

100 years ago was before processed foods started being fortified with vitamins and minerals.

It's interesting how the drafts for World War I and II played into this. Apparently, people in high places were concerned when large percentages of draftees were rejected due to being unfit. It's not necessarily that they were concerned about the health of people, but that they wanted to have an adequate supply of healthy men for the military.

..

The rye bread I've been eating lately lists "wheat flour" and "rye flour" as ingredients. I wondered if "wheat flour" means whole wheat flour or white flour. It means the latter; I should have realized that, since the label actually says "enriched wheat flour". But the rye flour is just listed as "rye flour".

The Hoax of "Enriched Wheat Flour"

A “wheat flour” or “enriched wheat flour” ingredient is technically no different than white flour. Manufacturers take whole-grain wheat, strip out 11 vitamins and minerals, then add synthetic chemicals that represent only four vitamins and one mineral.

Here’s the nutritional math: Whole-grain wheat – 11 nutrients + 5 nutrients = “Enriched”

..

4 hours later. Heck, I'm just going to throw those crackers away and be done with it.

They seem to be more often called "thumb notches" or "index notches" than "thumb guides" - I couldn't find any other references to the latter other than the original XSL-FO article I had been reading.

This page has a photo of a person cutting out the notches by hand:

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/394251/name-of-the-cut-outs-in-the-side-of-a-printed-dictionary-at-each-letter

This page has more details, along with a video of notches being manually cut with a tool:
https://printinghistory.org/about-thumb-indexes/

I thought they used machines for cutting all the notches at once! But I guess it would be hard to get the notches cut out to the exact right pages with a machine, after the book was bound. Or even if a machine was used, a person would still have to mark all the right dividing pages for the machine to cut to. For books like my big red dictionary*, which wasn't overly expensive, I wonder if they cut out the notches on each individual page, before the binding. That way they'd only need to set a specific size and position of the cut for each page, and the cutting could be done automatically by a machine as each page was printed.

*I'm not at home right now, and can't even be certain that my dictionary does have the notches like I was thinking it did.

Found some videos:

This machine requires someone to find the right pages to cut:
MSDIXER Duo, semi automatic index cutting machine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoiYQTYF6Gk

Ah well! If the machine can count pages, then it can be fully automatic:
IND-X45 fully automatic index cutting machine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKMfz6hPdOE

That thing where a familiar word all of a sudden looks unfamiliar and wrong. Today it happened with the word "school".

I was reading the "sch" as pronounced in German, "sh". And thinking to myself, surely that's not how the word [school] is spelled? No way, it looks too odd, it couldn't be. (Even now it looked weird again for a moment.) Little school kids shouldn't be subjected to such an odd word right off the bat.

I am. I am. Not superman. sigh ditty boom boom.

I feel. Like there's no one else who shares my mindset. I know there are people out there. Maybe not sharing all the same bits & pieces of it, but at least a subset. Yet they seem harder to find than in the past. Doing a search on DW interests, and only a few matches are returned, and most of them haven't updated in years. People aren't as active on YouTube anymore; I know I'm not either. Tumblr; I've never been able to get comfortable with that site. Forums, bah. No time. No fun.

boom ditty boom.

The gate was going ka chunk ka chunk for a few months ka chunk ka chunk every time I walked on by, ka chunk ka chunk ka chunk I'm stuck I'm stuck I'm stuck I'm trying trying trying to switch back to switch ka chunk ka chunk.
Every time I thought to myself, I should report that; it should be fixed. It's wasting electricity. Every time for more than a month. When I walked by, or drove by with my car windows open.
But it was one of those things which wouldn't stay in my mind long enough for me to actually do something about it. It slipped out of my mind, until the next time I passed it again. ka chunk ka chunk ka chunk. I should report that, I thought. I need to remember this time. When I get to the bench I will write a reminder note to myself. But by the time I got to the bench, it had slipped away away. Until this morning I finally ... I thought about it on the way to work, before even passing by it, and I wrote myself a note then, while stopped at a stop light. So I finally reported it. And they must have fixed it right away. No more ka chunk as I walked by today at lunch.

Thumb guides. Like the scooped out curves of paper on the side of a big dictionary. I was reading something today about print books versus web media, which described thumb guides as "expensive", in terms of producing books. I hadn't considered that before. But yeah, I guess they are rare, and probably even more so now in this age of fewer paper books.

Once I stopped mucking with and moping about the unlit lights, it only took me about 3 more hours to finish decorating the tree and the other room. I didn't use the tinsel, as the tree looks good to me without it this time. (Or maybe I just don't want to bother, in spite of having stored the tinsel in a special way last year to make it easier to put up). I also didn't put the batteries in the hallmark light & sound ornaments, and I skipped putting up my glittery painted mirror pieces. It all still looks good anyway. Now I just need to put away the boxes and clean up.

Tomorrow, probably going out to watch Star Wars 8 with Qiao.

It's odd, how a few years of vivid Christmases as a child have imprinted themselves so strongly on my brain. How even now, thirty years later, I still feel compelled to put up a Christmas tree and such, all because of those long ago memories, even though they are so vague now. They became a part of my core, and they still affect me, even though the Christmases of adulthood, or perhaps rather the *me* of adulthood, are so empty and meaningless compared to back then.

A memory of liking to crawl under the tree, and look up at it from below. At the orange, blue, green, glowing, bigger Christmas tree lights of back then.

A memory of playing chess. I suppose that has nothing to do with xmas. But it was in the same living room as where we had the xmas tree at xmas.

The American Armed Forces newspaper (Stars & Stripes) always had a coloring contest around xmas-time. They printed some holiday-themed image (outlined like from a coloring book), which you could color in and submit, in hopes of winning. I don't remember if there was any prize. I never won.

My mom baked German Christmas cookies, and I helped. Ground up hazelnuts, mixed into a dough, refrigerated, then rolled out and cut into shapes with cookie cutters. Baked, then iced and decorated. Then stored away in sealed containers, sometimes with pieces of apple, to give them time to soften up.

The excitement of getting presents. Of listening for reindeer hooves on the roof (nah, I never did that; above us was another apartment or the attic, not the roof). Of looking out the windows in the evening, looking for Santa. And for reindeer and a sleigh.

Of going on a road trip to visit our German relatives. The chatter of the people; the glow of the lights. The cold, desolate German winters.

Making hand-made Christmas decorations in elementary school. Red and green construction paper, cut into strips, glued into links for a paper chain to put on the tree. Paper cut-out snowflakes! Wrapping yarn into a diamond pattern around two crossed pieces of wood.

The thick sweet egg-nog in the tall round rippled metal cans. Iced Lebkuchen. The spicy sweet scent of Gluhwein. The Adventskalender, with pieces of chocolate or little pictures behind each day's door. The Adventskerzen, another candle lit each week. The angels singing, the little bells tinkling, the big church bells ringing.

Some winter / Christmas scenes from the "The Dark is Rising" book also managed to entwine themselves into my Christmas memories, such that when I think of Christmas, I often also get memories of those scenes from the book.

I got teary-eyed from what I read today. It wasn't even at the sad part; it was during the reading of the letters and the giving of an apology... In the same places as where Harry was beginning to feel like crying.

While reading the ostensibly sad part last Friday, I felt at first dread, then dismay, then uncertainty. I'm still uncertain. Because in movies and such, they almost always come back.

I'm still uncertain about the defense professor, too.

Dang, what a good book.

A month or 2 or 3 ago, I realized that even though the book is nearly 2000 pages long and it seemed like it would last me forever, I had reached over half-way through. Which meant that someday it would really come to an end. :(

Today's outburst of reading laughter was brought to me by this passage:

"That is not okay! You can’t do science with two people at once!"
"Er—"
"I mean, you can’t do science with two different people and not tell them about each other!"

http://www.hpmor.com/

(which of course won't make much sense unless you've read the 86 chapters before that part.)

And then I reflected that I could relate a lot more to that statement taken literally, than to that for which it might be interpreted as a metaphor.

Back in high school, we had to choose a scene from Macbeth, memorize it, and later recite it to the class. I chose one of the shortest scenes I could find, because, while I was good at remembering things, I wasn't particularly good at memorizing long strings of words.

I'm not sure if I ever recited it to the class; as much as I dreaded having to speak in front of the class, I usually ended up not having to do so. I never volunteered to go first (or 2nd or 3rd, or ever), and so the class usually ran out of time before getting to me. (Though in retrospect it would have been good to have more practice at public speaking. And it probably was a tiny bit of a let-down, getting all worked up at having to speak, and then not having to speak after all.)

As with the few other things I've memorized, I remembered it for a long time, because every so often I would recite it to myself. I didn't remember it perfectly - over time, I may have swapped in some wrong words here and there - but could still recite most of it.

Lately I had noticed that I could hardly remember any of it, except the first line. But this week at work, while standing at my desk, for some reason I started reciting it in my mind, and I remembered the whole thing again! The words flowed without a break.

Weird.*

It's the part with the witches talking, Act 3 Scene 5, that starts with "How did you dare to trade and traffic with Macbeth in riddles and affairs of death..."

But actually, reading that link, it turns out that in the intervening years, I had completely forgotten the 2nd half of it. I thought it ended with "thither he will come to [meet] his destiny". But I used to have the rest memorized too. "I am for the air" ... "my little spirit, see, Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me." Yep, I liked those parts!

Heh. And now I learn that the scene I memorized probably wasn't even written by Shakespeare. The above link describes the scene as "un-Shakespearean". This page says: "Some literary critics believe that these [sic] scene is way too hokey to be Shakespeare's work..."

Heh, hokey! You stick your left foot in, you stick your left foot out, you do the hokey-pokey and you shake it all about!

And that's another example of me remembering something, but not remembering it quite right.

*It's like how sometimes people's names are easy to recall, and sometimes not.

An uncle* of mine has written a book/memoir of his life:
The Kraut: On Being German after 1940

He was born in Germany, grew up in the U.K., and emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 17.

I've been reading it during my lunch times, in between walking** and eating. Some of it is rather dark, topic-wise, and some of it is hard to follow. But it's quite interesting.

It's available on Kindle or as a paperback, if anyone is curious about it.

* My mom's half-sister's cousin's husband's first wife's son.

** I've increased my walking circuit by about 10 minutes. My pedometer indicates I'm now getting up to about 8000 steps per day doing so.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/647783.html

I'm half-way through reading a PDF book, The Authoritarians. It's about the mindset of "right-wing authoritarian followers", the people who allow right-wing authoritarian leaders to gain and keep power. It's educational in that it puts into words many incomprehensible things that I've observed of some people, and tries to explain them.

I have a weird feeling like I'll get to the end of the book, and it will say "Now that you've read all this, if you believed it, that shows how gullible you are. This was all a psychological test.".

I was curious whether I myself would be pegged as an authoritarian follower or not. I am very rules-conscious. I dislike breaking rules. As a child, I recall breaking rules not feeling fun and exciting, but rather anxiety-inducing. In many cases I agree with the rules, such as vehicular speed limits, or with voluntarily declaring and paying use taxes on items I buy over the internet.

Yet if I disagree with a rule, I probably would break it. I don't consider myself likely to stand up to authority, yet I did in my own way when my company ordered everyone to work mandatory overtime.

The book mentions that children may end up different from their parents based on experiences during adolescence. If they broke rules and found it fun and exciting, that could reduce their respect for authority. If they broke rules and experienced trauma, that could increase their respect for authority. If their parents said certain groups of people were bad, but they became friends with people in those groups, that could reduce their respect for authority.

Based on the first survey in the book, my authoritarianism score is very low (24 out of 180). My religious fundamentalism score is the lowest possible (no surprise, considering that I'm agnostic).

In my case, I don't think I broke many rules as a kid*. But I grew up in a low-authoritarian and non-church-going family, so perhaps that influenced how I turned out. I don't view my dad as having been the "head of the family"; my parents seemed to have an equal relationship. But they separated early on, and I don't really remember much from when they were together. Neither of them seemed very strict or domineering.

*Maybe I did, but it was so early on that I don't remember well. Maybe I ignored rules that I felt were silly or which inhibited what I wanted to do. Did my parents ever tell me not to climb on the kitchen counters, or not to play in the woods? My mom made me wear dresses against my will; I suppose that may have reduced my respect for her authority.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/600432.html

"Experience the power of a bookbook™" (Watch on YouTube)

Video title: Experience the power of a bookbook™
Posted by: IKEA Singapore
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOXQo7nURs0

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/579042.html

andrewducker. List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don't take more than a few minutes and do not think too hard. They do not have to be the "right" books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way.

Impossible for me to do without taking more than a few minutes*, but still, I didn't think too hard about it. So it could be that I forgot ones which were more significant to me than these.

*As in me thinking, "umm, oh, what about that book with that guy and the talking horses**. What was the name of those books?" and "oh, that book with the girl in the boat***. Was that Riddlemaster of Hed? Was that Le Guin?..."

1. DragonLance series by Weis & Hickman
2. Shadow Man by Melissa Scott
3. Bone Dance by Emma Bull
4. The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper
5. **The Last Herald Mage trilogy by Mercedes Lackey
6. ***Duel of Sorcery trilogy by Jo Clayton
7. The Gate of Ivory trilogy by Doris Egan
8. The Chanur books by C.J. Cherryh
9. Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster
10. The Return of the Jedi novelization by James Kahn

Now, if any of you want to list ten books, consider yourself tagged!

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/577477.html

Raistlin (DragonLance)
Rumpelstiltskin (OUaT)

Dark magic. Golden skin. Physically weak, magically strong. hero/villain; good/evil.

This occurred to me out of nowhere yesterday evening. I hadn't been reading the books nor watching the show anytime recently.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/567940.html

I've started reading Regenesis, the sequel to Cyteen. This morning, I read the plot synopsis of Cyteen on Wikipedia, as I wasn't sure how much of the background story being mentioned in Regenesis was a part of the prior book. All I remember about Cyteen, besides it being a very large book, was that it was about a cloned girl, and her interactions with a few other characters. It was probably about 20 years ago that I read Cyteen. ::wow, twenty years!:: I didn't enjoy Cyteen as much as I did some of CJ Cherryh's other books.

Yet the Cyteen plot mentioned on Wikipedia doesn't seem at all familiar to me. Did I really read that story? According to Wikipedia, one edition of Cyteen was released as 3 separate books. I remember the book I read being very large, so I think I did read the whole big thing, not only one of the smaller books.

This kind of thing happens a lot with me lately. So many books, movies and TV shows are reruns or sequels, for which I only vaguely remember the plot of the original series. I feel that to get the most of the current story, I'd need to go back and re-read or re-watch the original story to refresh my memory. Yet I don't have time for doing that, and it doesn't seem like it would be worthwhile. If I already read/watched the old story once, and it didn't leave me with enough of an impression to keep me from forgetting about it, what's the point of reading or watching it again? It's not likely to have more of an impact on me the second time around than it did the first time. Even if I enjoyed the story a lot the first time, re-watching or re-reading something is never as exciting and enjoyable as the first time.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/526952.html

Is anyone interested in a soft-cover book "The Art of Warcraft" from the Warcraft III collector's edition (2002)? It's in very good condition. It might get thrown away, otherwise.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/520709.html

An article from 2003 which provides more info on the Timbuktu manuscripts:

Secrets of the Sahara

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/517327.html

The Brazen Bibliophiles of Timbuktu - How a team of sneaky librarians duped Al Qaeda

t160k.org - a campaign to raise money to protect the manuscripts, which now face problems related to moisture and mold.

T160K: Libraries in Exile from Evaporate Entertainment on Vimeo.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/517015.html

Comparing YouTube's automatic captioning/transcriptions to what I hear spoken in the videos impresses upon me how intelligent our brains are - to be able to decipher spoken words and phrases, even when the speech is not clear.

.

moon big
moon round

.

Still reading the 2nd book in the dragon tattoo girl series. It is engrossing.

.

EarthFare had black garlic for sale. This particular brand is a product of the U.S.A; $5 for a packet of 2 bulbs. I tossed a packet into my shopping cart, thinking, "I've been wanting to try that!" (remembering being intrigued by what I had read about it). I haven't yet opened the packet.

.

Why people eat tofu when they get out of prison in Korea.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/465683.html

I used Google Translate to check what the Swedish title (Män som hatar kvinnor) of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" means. As I typed the words, I seemed to recall that kvinnor means "women". But the translation displayed as "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". In fact, even "hatar kvinnor" by itself was translated as "Dragon Tattoo". Not-Very-Helpful, oh ye translating tool! I quite doubt that is how one says Dragon Tattoo in Swedish. Only by entering each word separately did it give me the presumably correct translation "Men who hate women".

The title of the 2nd book "Flickan Som Lekte Med Elden", does literally translate to "The Girl Who Played with Fire".

The title of the 3rd book "Luftslottet Som Sprängdes" (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) seems to mean "The Air Castle that was Blown (Up?)". No weirdness with that translation.

I finished reading the first book today. I'm not planning to watch any of the movies until I finish the books.

( Spoilers... )

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/456645.html

Qiao is sweet. He buys me vegan cookbooks.

Just recently, he got me "the get healthy, go vegan cookbook", and "Vegan Planet".
Then on another day, he got me "Ani's Raw Food Essentials".

Qiao isn't vegan himself, but he eats the things I cook.

Some of the recipes I tried lately were "Chilled Ginger-Peach Soup with Cashew Cream" and "Cool Cucumber Soup with Cilantro and Lime". Those were from the Vegan Planet book.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/414359.html

In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture

Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities.

The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear, represents the first time a data set of this magnitude and searching tools are at the disposal of Ph.D.’s, middle school students and anyone else who likes to spend time in front of a small screen. It consists of the 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.

The intended audience is scholarly, but a simple online tool allows anyone with a computer to plug in a string of up to five words and see a graph that charts the phrase’s use over time.
...
Google says the culturomics project raises no copyright issue because the books themselves, or even sections of them, cannot be read.

So far, Google has scanned more than 11 percent of the entire corpus of published books, about two trillion words.

Profile

Darkoshi

Darkoshi's Enchantment

May 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Base style: Abstractia by chiming
Theme: Violet Night by nornoriel

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Saturday, May 24th, 2025 07:51 am

Entries tagged with books

driven, again. Nutrition, 100 years ago.

More on thumb guides / thumb notches / index notches on the side of books

miscellaneous nothings

Christmas memories

HPMOR chapter 93

HPMOR chapter 87

memory recall .... don't shake a stick at it, shake a spear

book

authoritarianism

Experience the power of a bookbook™

tagged

Rstl**in character connection

Cyteen and lost memories

Warcraft art book

tim book two

Timbuktu's treasures

hearing words, not just sounds

google translate Fail - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

cookbooks

database of books