Month: April 2004

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The evolution of nicknames

Before Fiona was born, we already knew that we wanted her middle name to be Chenoweth. It’s an old family surname from Abi’s side of the family, and because it’s so unusual, we could use it equally well for a boy or a girl. (We didn’t know Fiona was going to be a girl.)

“Chenoweth” also gave us a useful placeholder name to use for her in utero. It was the name we used when we talked to Alex about the baby in mama’s tummy, and by January he was quite thoroughly drilled on the idea. Then we changed the rules on him, and told him that Chenoweth would be getting a new name when she was born. Alex seemed to grasp this concept, too, but when Fiona actually arrived and got her new name, Alex thought she was getting her new name in addition to her old one. He started calling her “Chenoweth Fiona”.

Well, so did we. If you’re a parent, you’ll be familiar with the way that families develop their own idioms and figures of speech. You’ll say something to the child, and the child will misinterpret it, turning the phrase into something almost unrecognizable, but terribly cute. Then you start using the altered form of the phrase, reinforcing the mutation, and a new “family phrase” is born.

“Chenoweth Fiona” turned out to be quite a mouthful for Alex, though, and he quickly started abbreviating it to “Che-o-Fiona”, or “Chuffiona”. And recently I’ve started calling her “Chuffy” just for short.

It’s strange how these things go.

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The dark side of blogging

If there was any doubt about the desirability of Movable Type’s forthcoming TypeKey authentication service for blog comments, what’s been happening to Kathryn Cramer over the last few days should provide ample justification:

“There’s been a lot of sanctimonious criticism, to which I will not link, about the inadequacy of Kos’s apology. Does anyone really think that if he had apologized and withdrawn his statement, all would be forgiven? Ask Kathryn Cramer. She went too far in her coverage of the Fallujah killings, and posted some unwarranted speculation. In response, she got vile pornography and death threats posted to her comments section. She took the errant post down and apologized profusely, and the hostile comments increased – because, apparently, taking the post down meant that she was trying to hide. She’s continuing to receive violent threats, some of them directed at her children.”

(from Respectful Of Otters, via Electrolite)

Parallels between TypeKey and the US-Visit programme are duly noted.

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Backing off of Thunderbird

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my main email client for the last couple of weeks, but the experiment is coming to an end, and I’m moving back to Outlook again. Two main reasons: spam, and unstable message filters.

I have been using SpamBayes for Outlook to filter spam for almost a year now, and it rocks. After spending a couple of months double-checking its assessments of what is spam and what isn’t, I found that it was never issuing false positives, that is, categorizing good messages (“ham”) as junk. If it encounters a message that it is unsure about, it puts it in a “Possible Spam” folder, which I check manually every couple of days. Some messages that end up here are real, and some are junk. As soon as I sort them appropriately, though, SpamBayes analyses their characteristics, and improves its odds of filing similar messages correctly in the future. Very rarely, maybe once or twice a week, an actual piece of spam will make it past SpamBayes and get into my inbox. A similar re-training process follows.

Thunderbird stacks up poorly against SpamBayes in three ways:

  • It doesn’t have a “Possible Spam” middle ground. You’ve got spam and you’ve got ham, but nothing inbetween to indicate uncertainty.
  • It lacks a decent interface for you to properly “train” the filter about what is spam and what isn’t.
  • It doesn’t indicate what the “spam rating” was for a given message. SpamBayes allows you to see the spamminess score it has assigned to a given message, and it allows you to fine-tune the levels at which something is definitely ham or definitely spam(15% and 85% respectively, in my case).

Next up is the message filtering. It works great most of the time, but every now and then I found that a message that had been processed by a filter (either one of my custom filters, or the built-in junk filter) would be marked as unread, and bounced into the Trash. Huh? What’s up with that?

Bearing in mind that Thunderbird is still early beta software (0.5), these issues may well go away in a later release. My overall impression of the program was very favourable, though: it’s small, fast, nicely tweakable, and cross-platform. I’ll be keeping my eye on it as it develops. (That is, if I don’t get seduced by GMail in the meantime….)

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Cry baby

There’s only so much you can do with a baby screaming in your ear. Reading becomes difficult. Writing becomes damn near impossible. Physical coordination is impaired. There’s something in the shrill, primal wail that short-circuits your synapses and jams your neural pathways. So is it any wonder that the US military is using this noise as a new weapon in Iraq? (via Making Light)

US troops are to be armed with a stun gun that uses a baby’s high-pitched scream to bring the enemy to its knees.

The gun, which will be issued to marines in Iraq this month, fires “sonic bullets” that can be targeted like a torch beam.

Anyone hit with a full blast would suffer excruciating pain, permanent deafness and some form of cellular damage. A prolonged blast could kill.

The “Secret Scream” gun as it is called, could revolutionise the way US troops deal with snipers, suicide bombers and riots in the turmoil of post-war Iraq.

The actual sound used is a recording of a baby’s scream played backwards.

“For most people, even if they plug their ears, it will produce the equivalent of an instant migraine,” said Woody Norris, chairman of American Technology Corporation, the Californian company that has produced the weapon.

“It will knock some people to their knees.”

No shit. Prolonged exposure to babies’ crying has been known to make even men yank out their breasts in the vain hope of appeasing the boundless appetites and unplumbable desires of a howling infant.

According to the height and weight charts, our wee Fiona, ten weeks old today, is the size of a healthy five-month old. She’s not fat, she’s just huge. Most five-month olds are eating some solid food to bulk out their diet. But because Fiona is too young for solids, she gets a breastful of milk at three-hour intervals…and then is hungry again an hour later. You can imagine how happy that makes her.