Obama Presidential Center Museum

Obama Presidential Center Museum

Trying to read the text at the top of this edifice and I'm not having much luck. Found another image on Obama's website that shows the text is on two adjacent sides and wraps around the corner. They also give the text, but I wanted to see if it matched what's in the photograph. It took some doing, but I was able to piece it together. 

YOU ARE AMERICA	UNCONSTRAIN
ED BY HABIT AND	CONVENTION
UNENCUMBERED	BY WHAT IS REA
DY TO SEIZE WH	AT OUGHT
TO BE FOR EVERY	WHERE IN THIS
COUNTRY THERE	ARE FIRST STEPS
TO BE TAKEN THE	RE IS NEW GROU
ND TO COVER THE	RE ARE MORE
BRIDGES TO BE CR	OSSED AMERICA
IS NOT THE PROJEC	T OF ANY ONE
PERSON THE SING	LE MOST POWER
FUL WORD IN OU	R DEMOCRACY
IS THE WORD WE	WE THE PEOPLE
WE SHALL OVERCO	ME YES WE CAN
THAT WORD IS OW	NED BY NO ONE
IT BELONGS TO	EVERYONE OH
WHAT A GLORIOUS	TASK WE ARE GI
VEN TO CONTIN	UALLY TRY TO IM
PROVE THIS GREAT	NATION OF OURS

It doesn't help that there are no spaces, no punctuation, words are broken in arbitrary places and some letters are cut in half to wrap around the corner.

Arabic isn't just for Arabs

Running

Horse

Victor Mair posts a story on Language Log about the numerous scripts used in writing in Indonesia. Seems not everyone uses the same writing for the same language. Some people in China use Arabic script to write Chinese. I think my whole language applecart has been upset. 

When I first learned about Chinese writing way back in elementary school, the idea I got was that each pictograph was a symbol for something, like there could be a symbol for a horse and a symbol for running and if you put the two together they meant 'running horse'.

Sometime recently (like since I retired), I got the idea that pictographs also represented sounds, which was unrelated to the name of symbol. So if you took the sounds from the horse and running symbols you might get a completely unrelated word, like 'dog butt'. 

Now I'm really confused. When someone says 'dog butt', are they talking about a dog butt, or are they talking about a running horse? And how they heck would you know? Well, if you grew up speaking Chinese it would be obvious, well, I hope it would be.

But through all this, I thought Chinese pictographs were used for the Chinese language and Arabic script was used for the Arabic language. But evidently that is not always the case. Could you write an English sentence using Arabic script, and if you could, could anybody understand it? We have English spellings of some Arabic words / names in the news, but they are pretty meaningless as they seem to be full of apostrophes and the apostrophes are all in places that would never show up in an English word.

Me, I think we should call the Northern Capital of China Peking like Hollywood intended.

Runes

Came across this

ᚲᚨᚾ᛫ᚷᛟ᛫ᛋᛏᚱᚨᛁᚷᚺᛏ᛫ᛏᛟ᛫ᚺᛖᛚᛚ

Didn't know what it meant. Google Translate couldn't help. Poking around I find that these symbols are runes, and this page by Xah Lee can translate them. Translated, it comes out like this

ᚲᚨn᛫gœ᛫strᚨigᚺt᛫tœ᛫ᚺell

The left angle bracket could be a 'c', the 'f' looking rune might be an 'a', and the 'H' is an 'h'.

 Via Unwanted Blog

Gobble-De-Gook

I am filling out an insurance claim form and I notice that the printed text is not very clear. This line in particular is sets a new standard for incomprehensible legalese:

Just another example of our glorious civilization going to hell in a hand-basket.

Sign of the Times

Sign at entrance to Ft. Hood, Texas

Ft. Hood is a big place. Here's a Google Streetview of a sign at a SE Entrance.

Via Iaman

WordWord of the Day

CamelCase Camel

Historically, programmers have used three ways of joining multiple words into one variable name:
Hyphens:
first-name, last-name, master-card, inter-city.
Underscore:
first_name, last_name, master_card, inter_city.
Camel Case:
FirstName, LastName, MasterCard, InterCity.

First time I've run into Camel Case. Underscore is popular. It requires using the shift key, but so do capital letters. Two issues  are readability versus compactness. Leaving out the underscore makes a word more compact. I'm not sure how readable Camel Case is. It's certainly better than all lower case. I've run into a several ambiguous URL's the last few days. They were written in all lowercase letters. Wish I had recorded them, but I didn't, and I certainly don't remember them.

Don't think I've ever run into hyphenated names in programming. Every programming language I've dealt with treats hyphens as a minus sign, so master-card means subtract the value of variable card from the variable master. 

Via W3 Schools Javascript tutorial.

Merry Christmas to Me

Picture from the current, which has a decent review.

Look what Santa brought me: a big box of grade-A smack. Actually older son got me this CD (Compact Disc, not a Certificate of Deposit) based on my asking if he had ever heard of Lorde, which is pronounced Lord, which is the second bit of letteral confusion in three words. I mean, I've heard of heroines and I've heard of pure heroin, but I've never heard of pure heroines, or have I? Purity is one of those mythical qualities possessed by mythical girls, but I can't right off the top of my head think of a heroine who was classed as pure. Royals on YouTube.

Ninja Bums

Down in Eugene the other day I saw a woman standing on the curb holding a big cardboard sign:

Ninjas Killed My Family

Need Money For

Kung-Fu Lessons

When we stopped in Salem on the way back for ice cream, there were people standing on the corner with your more standard pan-handling signs.

There was a young couple standing at the top of the exit ramp on my way to lunch today. His sign said something about needing a tire. I gave him a five.

I mentioned this at lunch and Marc tells me he had seen a bus dropping off people at key pan-handling locations. I don't know if this is a true story or not, but it is certainly believable. If you can stomach it I am sure you can collect enough money by panhandling to make it worth your while. The economy is certainly in bad shape, and I am sure it has hit some people harder than others. I am always of two minds about giving money to bums. On one hand, why don't they a get a job, lazy good-for-nothing slackers. On the other hand, there, but for the grace of god, go I.

I stopped at Costco for gas today. It's a big place. I think they must have half a dozen people working there pumping gas. Most of them seemed to be my age, i.e. old. I'm thinking there, but for the grace of god, go I. On the other hand, even a menial job like pumping gas might be a nice change of pace from my aimless bouncing. And it would be bringing money in.

On the gripping hand (I saw that somewhere yesterday), by not working, I am leaving a position open for someone who might need it worse than I do.

WARNING - MADE IN USA

 If all our exports carry this kind of warning, it's no wonder our industries are suffering.

Marc sent me this from Nicaragua. It looks like there are some other words in the middle, but I can't quite read them. It kind of looks like:

MARINE CHILD

HOUSE MAINTENANCE

AUDITIVE VANDAL

MOE . . .  AND BAD

Stupid Joke du Jour

Via Steve

Quantum bogodynamics

The internet is just full of useful information, like:

There are bogon sources (such as politicians, used-car salesmen, TV evangelists, uninformed philosophers, and suits in general), bogon sinks (such as taxpayers, gullible students, and computers), and bogosity potential fields.^[2] Bogon absorption causes human beings to behave mindlessly and machines to fail (and may also cause both to emit secondary bogons). The precise mechanics of bogon-computron interaction are not well-understood, but when a heavy particle such as a computron is impacted by a bogon, which is a fast, low-mass particle, computrons appear to preferentially decompose into multiple bogons and fat electrons, creating a cascade of failures in nearby equipment.

From our friend.

Update December 2016 replaced missing image.