jinian

My panel two T-rex shirt was a hit with the receptionist at acupuncture today. She had to show the acupuncturist her favorite comic, "bicurious", and demonstrated how the phrase "Curiosity: SATISFIED" and accompanying alt-text-indicated head movements could be applied to other nouns as well. It's always fun to find unsuspected GIANT GEEKS out in the world.

Jigsaw Renaissance appears to be pretty cool, but god so hot inside today. The lox, cream cheese, and peach ice cream was bizarre enough that I didn't want to eat enough of it to experience a cooling effect. Favorite project: that thing (cloud chamber) where uranium ore was putting off particles that could be seen due to a supercooled layer of alcohol vapor.

I thought I was mostly done with this paper weeks ago. Nope. My sketchy first draft was a pale shadow of what it needs to be. At that point, I had read n other papers, so I knew what I was going to say in my paper and had written a shortish version without references. Then I went to fill that out -- putting in the citations should be easy, right? Ha. I had to read approximately n more papers for each section of the paper to figure out whom to cite where (and why). And then I went to the paragraph level and found that I had to read n papers for each of those! Maybe this is different if you have read the important papers in a field for years and years. Anyway, I am still working at paragraph level but I feel safe in saying that this fractality bottoms out at sentence level, where the largest number of papers I've had to read per unit has been three.

( Mentoring maundering )

My awesome news for the day is this: I found a begonia with grouped but functional stomata! Yes!! (A book has a photo of groups of 3-4 stomata that are still functional, but the credit was just Begonia and I need to take original photos for this article. I've been on an epidermal scavenger hunt since, and because there are a zillion kinds of begonia and the book's author died recently, I wasn't at all sure I'd find this.) PI was preoccupied, but I showed both postdocs and then PI came and admired it too. Yay! The problem now is that the epidermis is very bumpy so hard to photograph, but I can cope with that one way or another.

The big winner: Rex begonia "Roberta" (looks similar to "Shamus")

Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to make a celebratory apple pie with clustered steam-vents.

I find from the Wikipedia article on paper sizes that the people who made the notebook paper I bought at the drugstore in an unguarded moment are not merely evil or mad. The 8"-by-10.5" paper size was apparently the standard U.S. government paper size for no few years, though the reason isn't exactly clear from the article. (I can guess what they mean by "Apparently this would enable discounts from purchase of paper for schools," but why would it do that?) My guess is that paper of that size was cheaper to start with, possibly because 8.5"-by-11" paper that was messed up in production could be retrimmed to the smaller size and sold by the paper company instead of pulped. The U.S. government went over to 8.5-by-11 paper during the Reagan era, a change which Wikipedia attributes to the prevalence of photocopiers, which didn't tend to have a paper cartridge dedicated to each strange size.

You may have known this already: A4 paper, which pretty much the whole rest of the world uses instead of letter, is based on a clever series of scaled paper sizes based on the ratio 1:sqrt(2), meaning that if you bisect the paper's long axis to make two half-size sheets, each of the daughter sheets has the same aspect ratio as the original. A3 sheets can be folded in half shortwise to make brochures the size of A4 sheets, and so on. A0 paper has an area of one square meter, giving it dimensions of 841mm by 1189mm. There are also B and C series in the international paper standard, both larger than A. That part was not well thought out; B is biggest, then C, then A, so when a country like Sweden chooses to extend the alphabetical scheme in a rarely-used fit of systematics you get size progressions like A4, E4, C4, G4, B4, F4, D4, H4, A3. While it's lovely that each of those is an area increase of 2^1/16, remembering the screwy order is not lovely at all.

My eyes started to glaze over when the article got to tables of dimensions, but I perked up at the PA series, which had been mentioned earlier. It's not actually in the standard bcause the standard-makers thought they had enough damned paper sizes already, thank you, but it's nifty in its way: In landscape orientation, it has the same 4:3 aspect ratio as the displays of traditional TV sets, most computers and data projectors. PA4 is therefore a good choice as the format of computer presentation slides. At the same time, PA4 is the largest format that fits on both A4 and U.S./Canadian "Letter" paper without resizing. Neat stuff.