Today in History (04.07.2013)

* News that Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, has died at 88 (passed away on 02.07.2013);
* NASA decommissions weather satellite Jason-I (11), because the satellite's last transmitter finally failed;
* King Albert II of Belgium (79) announced that he will abdicate on July 21.

In other news:

Europe
* France apologizes: Je Suis Sorry;
* And now it's been reported that France's own French Fries are not much different from Freedom Fries somewhere far, far away;
* while in

United States
* ...most everyone else rather ungratiously confirms what has been going on all along at the Ministries of Peace, Love, and Truth.
* A huge wildfire in Arizona still remains out of control.

Middle East
* Egypt's military stage a coup yesterday, installing a judge to be acting president today. The U.S. threatens withdrawal of aid to Egypt, while Israel tries to be nice.

Science and tech
* Vine and Instagram fight like a cat and dog: competition in video sharing functionality heats up. Ten years ago we would not have known what these things even are;
* Livers can be grown in laboratory from stem cells. We really are living the future.

"Something good..."

There is an English-language phrase about "something good coming out of something bad". Such sentiment would only serve as a fallacy with regard to gravely horrible history anywhere, as if this kind of wording were to justify the means to an end.

Värdsõnad redux.

Mispärast kõlbab eesti keelde
"prügikonteiner", mis on 14 tähe, 5 silbi ja 4 eri täishäälikuga,
kuid mitte
"voogedastus", mis on 11 tähe, 4 silbi ja vaid 3 eri täishäälikuga?

Aga sellepärast, et viimane rikub eesti keelele omast hääldusrütmi, kuna puudub sujuv üleminek ühelt (täis)häälikult järgmisele — sõltumata sellest, kui kiiresti on võimalik ebamugavat sõna hääldada võrreldes pikema ja pealtnäha keerulisemaga.

Mõtlesin alguses, et üleminekuks võiks lugeda kaashäälikuid, mis siis vastavalt hääldusomadustele toetaks või ei toetaks üleminekut.

Siis selgus, et kaashäälik on osa üleminekust kui protsessist, kuna kaashäälikust sõltub see, milline peaks olema järgmine sobiv täishäälik. Sõltub – kui mitte täielikult, siis vähemalt osaliselt.

Teisalt tuli meelde, et oma kaalu annab ka täishäälikute endi pikkus ja asetus sõnas ning eri täishäälikute kokkusobivus sõna sees. /Selle põhjal võiks teha huvitavat statistikat. Äkkk on midagi olemas ka juba?

Võib tähendada, et eesti keele morfoloogias teatud häälikuühendid lihtsalt ei sobi kokku, mistõttu nende kombinatsioonid ebaloomulikena tunduvadki.

Samuti saaks lähtuda kasvõi silbiehitusest: enamik silpe algavad kaashäälikuga, aga liitsõnas "voogedastus" koosneb teine, ühetäheline, silp täishäälikust ja kolmas algab kaashäälikust.

Omaette teema oleks kogu selle sobivuse mõõtmine/hindamine, ning see, milline on eesti keelele (või ka keeltes üldisemalt) loomulik või ebaloomulik üleminek ühelt (täis)häälikult teisele.

Miks siiski ei sobi juba ülalpool mainitud "edastusohje", ning teisedki, nagu ütk, kärajad, vabakond, taristu, tüürel, ajur ja muud nisksed, kui on juba olemas ülekandekontroll, infrastuktuur, draiver, ajam? Miks ei juurdunud "selver"? Aga seetõttu, et eeltoodud on kõik uudissõnad. Jaa, "selver" ka.

"Selver" ei kõlvanud ka seetõttu, et siis oli juba mitu kasutusel olevat sõna: laat, turg, pood, kaubamaja. Uut vaja ei olnud.

Ja üldse sellel ajal: "lihapood", "piimapood", "viinapood", "leivapood". "GUM", "abc", defitsiit, "letialune" ja "tutvused". "Lihakarn" on veel õite vana.

Nüüd: "Prisma", "Selver", "Rimi", "Hüperrimi", "Norde Centrum", erinevad paiganimega keskused.

"Mitu kokka head suppi ei tee."

Esiti toimub pompöössusega tipnev vähest kajastust saanud sündmuste jada, kuhu kuulub ja millest võtab osa kitsas ring ajuhiiglaseid. Muidugi on nende töö viljakas ja ennastsalgav ;-)

Siis võtab kirjutav ja rääkiv meedia need sõnad kähku kasutusele, veel ootamata, et säärased mõistusetöö tulemused oleksid vastavalt ka keelde juurdunud. Kes üldse palus??

"Kui see pole katki, ära paranda seda."

Sellepärast ongi (õieti olidki) olemas sellised väljaanded, nagu "Väike uudissõnastik" (1983), mida luges piisavalt palju inimesi, kes kokku moodustasid arvult kriitilise ja sellest johtuvalt ka väga usaldusväärse valimi, mille peamiseks iseloomuks oli detsentraliseeritus. Seda veel sügaval nõukogude ajal (ei, ma ei igatse seda aega taga).

Niisugune raamatuvormis uudissõnade nimistu oli sama hea kui tänapäeval tarkvaraprogrammi arendus- või beetaversioon. Ainult et antud trükimaterjali eeliseks oli suurem "testijate" ring; hüljatud sõnade arv näitab vägagi hästi ära kui armutult praak välja roogiti.

Nüüd tahetakse olla "protsessis sees", "olla selle osa" jne...

Jätan seesinase praegu ilma lõputa, nii et "Jätkub..."

Revolution OS

Film review

Ahh, the good times :-)

This film was made during the dot-com boom, and, per release information on IMDb, first screened at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2001.

Only in its end titles does the film show the first casualties of the dot.com crash (a second release of the film was in 2002), so this documentary really well reflects the spirit of the times, just as the original series of "Star Trek" was the best science fiction in 1960's.

Despite its shortcomings of appearing propaganda-like (see some of the more balanced IMDb reviews) and not the most stellar music editing, I still kinda like the documentary, as it was filmed during a time when life seemed really nice: The dot com crash had yet to happen, and 9/11 hadn't happened yet... And so the times were quite a bit more hopeful than in the years that followed.

Alas, many of the companies mentioned aren't there anymore: VA Linux, Cygnus, Netscape, and many-many others. Not long after, Corel stopped making Linux. Sun Microsystems was purchased by Oracle. Red Hat is still here, but it's not exactly in the desktop business. Netscape itself was purchased by AOL, and subsumed into it, and then not much is left of it. Netscape's move to open-source its Communicator suite (which included the Navigator browser) was indeed pivotal, as it laid the ground for Mozilla and eventually Firefox.

Nobody at the time saw the emergence of Google. Or that the principles of this freedom would lead to Lawrence Lessing to found the Creative Commons movement, which gave additional impetus to found Wikipedia. Incredible.

I somehow failed to notice at the time how even the modern men's haircuts and hair styles were different back then, short of being less astute. I guess since these styles were ubiquitous, then nobody really noticed S:)

Going All the Way

Film review that was first a comment; in reply to a thread on IMDb.

I waited, too, to see if they'd discover one another further than what's in the movie, though New York's Greenwich Village alluded to as much.

The film felt open-ended and probably stayed true to the very letter of the novel it was based on, which, I assume, was just as vague, suggesting several possible outcomes, depending on the eye of the beholder.

I would have ended it differently and sweetly. Even if such a happy-end situation were there, then after they guys would meet in NYC, the most possible outcome would have by then been known in advance to any viewer with a brain.

Fortunately, the ending was not as tragic as the one in "The Locusts"...
Would I (have) cast a different actor to play Sonny, just for the sake of seeing Sonny and Gunner (as played by Affleck) discover one another and consummate a possible guy/guy relationship brewing underneath?

Well, I don't know if I would — Davies is just too unique an actor, and the original story shows an environment so devoid of substance that it would not want to suggest anything that would be gay; For example, sodomy laws in the U.S. were not repealed before 1970's, neither was homosexuality an acceptable topic in the kind of polite society shown in this film. The novel by the same title was published in 1970, which is when attitudes towards homosexuality in the U.S. somehow started to thaw, and then only really slowly.

I think I did notice some lines in the movie from which I could infer that there could have been guy/guy relationships, I think in the very inconspicous way Gunner formed words in his sentences. Oh well.

Yet, in conclusion, "Going All the Way" did suggest possible ways of how the Beat Generation sprung up.

The Golden Age of Mustamäe

In reply to Giustino's missed america

I guess what Giustino is referring to about the simpler times of 1950's is what for some people resembled the Golden Era, a time, probably ending in 1940's when things were good and fine in America. I can't really put a spot on that one, but this might be a span of time before television took hold in the States, so for a similar reminiscense of "old good times", this time before the time of television, I'd tentatively put The Golden Age of Radio as the one.

When I further thought of this and similar terms, I realised that they have a tendency to come to use well after a period of growth and/or progress has (either gradually or abruptly) ended, in a time when people are a whole lot more sober about their outlook and look at the past with some nostalgia.

This is the kind of past that is not always known by today's contemporaries, but passed down by their older brethren and ancestors, through folklore and culture. We may not have a first-hand feeling of what the 1950's were like, but we've seen it in in the movies, read about it from the books.

Perhaps most interestingly, the books and movies that we refer to when reminiscing about an era may have had less significance in their time than now.

Some cultural items that proffer to establish in the minds of masses the way how things felt like at the time fail to do so, IMO, and some don't.

It's difficult to assess nostalgia. Sometimes it's as simple as having a meal with friends (or alone) in a local diner, or that you actually spent quite a lot more time actually talking, discussing, and interacting with friends and family.

---

"Nüüd elan Mustamäel...", which Liivimaa parim ratsutaja referred to, is "Mustamäe valss", the lyrics for which can be found here. The page has an inset which says that the song was written in 1971 and explains that Mustamäe was first known as All-Nõmme or Mustamäe-alune (I'm too tired to parse all this into English). The inset explains further that to people suffering from cramped dwellings in "wooden" districts, a spacious property seemed like a godsend.

Historically, before Mustamäe and Õismäe and Lasnamäe, there were more wooden houses and dwellings across all of Tallinn than Kalamaja (which is just representative of the type). A large amount of those wooden houses have been replaced by newer fare both in Soviet and post-Soviet times.

Even in 1980's, upgrading from ühiskorter (communal apartment) in ühiselamu (ühikas) or a one-room flat to a three-room flat anywhere in the city was like a huge stroke of luck. I know there are absurd-sounding, but probably true stories of even three generations living in a one- or two-room flat, and maybe a cat and a dog, too. In those times, a three-room flat was never unreasonable, but a dream not always attainable; well-todo people had a four-room flat and teh rich ppl had a private house, or eramaja :)

More on ühiskorter in Estonian Wikipedia can be read about in article talk about the term.

Cold Y Generation

This is what I planned to write Wikipedia: Talk: Cold Y Generation, but for the sake of brevity there, I placed the bulk here. Maybe will expand later with more relevant stuff and other links.

We used fountain pens at first and second class (and maybe beyound) to exercise good handwriting (no "kid" font). The childhood historical shift was the end of the Cold War, but here termed as sovereign countries regaining their independence, which I recall in a manner similar to how User:209.6.159.204 remembers the Berlin Wall event: knowing that things happened, but confused at first as to why. So I never understood either (and was poorly interested on) what "Rambo" and "Commando" were until I learned their short synopses in my 20's and saw a couple scenes from these. I can vaguely remember the Challenger accident and the Chernobyl incident.

Ditto on reality tv and the MTV Generation. I am still aware of the much more simplistic way of life before the onslaught of Internet technology, of which I was a very early adopter compared to my peers at that time. 9/11 did make an impact, perhaps for the reasons of having been disinterested in evening news in early years and later having had the chance to follow 9/11 on the net through MSNBC's live feed (which was shown in a small window) to see the eventual demise of WTC7 (missed the first two towers because of school).

Never had a VHS player in a household and no cable for a very long time. Never got the vibe of popular local or U.S.-focused social networking websites targeted at Gen-Y'ers.

To present a cultural vantage point (like Jman did) of what I watched in the 1980's, then I can tell that I, perhaps willingly, as a means to an escapade, grew up on lots of TV: Soviet kid's cartoons and Estonian kid's films, MacGyver (on Finnish TV), Latino soaps and then throughout 1990's "Santa Barbara", "The A-Team" and "The Equalizer", the horrendous "Saved by the Bell" (still all 1980's stuff), some of "BH 90210" and "Melrose Place" (and "Valley of the Dolls" to boot :), "Star Trek: TNG", then later DS9 and followed Farscape into adulthood.

cbc.ca column