Quote The Princess bride book at him.

"Life isn't fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it's a terrible thing to do. It's not only a lie, it's a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it's never going to be."

This is kind of adorable. I'm reading about the curriculum at Sidwell Friends (I had an actual reason for going to this website, then found the info I was looking for and started just clicking around), and the fourth graders there have lessons in mediation and working out problems and finding peaceful solutions, and then, on certain days, two fourth graders go to join the first and second graders at recess as the designated "peacemakers," and if any of the younger kids have an argument about something, they bring it to the fourth grade peacemakers who help them find a peaceful way to settle the argument.

I'm not sure what he thinks he's losing by avoiding one word which has approximately a thousand perfectly good synonyms, but he was for some reason very upset about this and complaining about it for a long while. Loudly.

I share his grievance. Different synonyms have different nuances. The word shouldn't be put out to pasture because other people are ignorant.

Both joyful and allergy-inducing, a page full of videos of dogs greeting their humans who've been away on deployment: [link]

His point was that the "often best avoided" was just not fair. I'm not sure what he thinks he's losing by avoiding one word which has approximately a thousand perfectly good synonyms, but he was for some reason very upset about this and complaining about it for a long while. Loudly.

You know, if the guy weren't being an ass about it, he could join me in the "wistful about the otherwise kinda nifty word which I first saw in Tolkien" corner.

Sorry for the total random: Is arrowroot powder available at regular grocery stores? (For Thanksgiving, my mom usually asks me to email her a grocery list of what I need for the stuff I'm cooking, and there are a few things I need that I usually get at health food stores, so I'm ordering them online so that my mom won't have to try to figure out where to buy it.)

Hey Hil, can I ask you a Matlab question? I suspect it's pretty simple, I'm looking for a way to loop through a set of six different .mat files (names arranged in a list), and suspect I'm missing something simple.

Sorry, I don't really know Matlab too well.

Ah well. And now I can't for the life of me recall why I thought you did. Sorry about that.

Hil, huge congrats on the publication of the paper! That's fantastic.

Am getting through my dissertation quite well. Potentially disastrously, it's all methodology and not much in the way of results. I need to call my supervisor and go "waaaaah" at her until she tells me what to do about this.

PhDs also need thinking about quite soon. Some crazy departments have scholarship application deadlines of the end of November. For sessions beginning next September. Madness.

In 'Wake Up With Hugh Laurie' today, Jeeves sings. [link] (Do you guys know 'Jeeves & Wooster'? Very funny early 90s stuff - worth watching.)

But if they're under a skirt and petticoats isn't the shiny sort of hidden?

Yes. That is the point, for me. It's a feature, not a bug. A little bit of shiny that you just get the hint of under petticoats could be neat. Shiny leggings? Less so.