How to run a legal, ethical, and
profitable collection agency
The business wisdom of Hazel R. Covington, 1925-1985

Unethical bill collectors are a hot topic right now, as lots of people are in debt, confused, and unaware of their rights. Everyone should know that a bill collector doesn't have the right to harass you even if you really owe the debt, and if you don't really owe it, they can get into real trouble. For more about this, click here and here.

Well... Back in the mid-1970s, my mother managed the collection department of the Credit Bureau of Athens (Georgia) and turned it around from taking a loss (subsidized by the reporting department, which was the real purpose of the bureau) to making a nice profit. It did so well that in 1997 it spun off to become a separate company, still operating her way.

The way she did it was based on one simple insight: You don't have to hound people in order to collect money. You don't have to risk run-ins with the law or federal regulations. You don't even have to make people unhappy.

The way she saw it, if a customer refuses to pay a bill, there's likely to be a reason. It may be real or it may be bogus, but you, as a collector, don't want to get tangled up in it. It can waste huge amounts of your time, during which you're not making money.

Instead, go for the people who will pay willingly, but who simply never got their bill, or didn't know what it was for, or in some cases, didn't realize they could work out a deal if they were in genuine hardship. Instead of threatening lawsuits, just get into the out-of-town phone books, change-of-address records, etc., and find the people whose bills never got to them. Pick the low-hanging fruit.

The key fact is, there are enough of those to keep an honest collection agency busy all the time. You don't even have to touch the difficult ones. Easy ones are everywhere. And by handling the easy ones, the collection agency is performing a genuinely appreciated service — tracking down people whose bills didn't reach them — rather than making life hard for anyone.

[Addendum:] I should point out that my family has no connection with a loan company called Covington Credit located nearby. In my mother's time, her employer was called Credit Bureau of Athens, Inc.

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Short notes

[Revised slightly.]

Superhuman eyes for the police: Suburban Atlanta police now have a gadget that uses a video camera and a computer to read license plates of passing cars and compare them to a database. They say it helps them find cars that are wanted.

Since the purpose of a license plate is to make a car identifiable, and it's required to be displayed when the car is on a public road, I don't see anything unethical about the new technology. But it did make me stop and think a moment.

People have certain reasonable expectations of privacy. One is that, even when in public places, they will not routinely be observed with technology that has superhuman abilities (either recognition or memory). When I walk down the street, I don't mind people seeing me, but I'm a little wary of being identified automatically or recorded for posterity. That's why I have mixed feelings about sidewalk cameras (common in England and starting to appear in Athens, Georgia), especially as computers get more and more involved in interpreting the images.

Perhaps the right conclusion is that public places are a lot more public than they used to be. We got accustomed to an artificial kind of privacy in crowds or on crowded roads. It's going away.

Stupid bank tricks: Overextended banks have taken to lowering people's credit limits to practically zero, and saying it's not the customer's fault, they're just "tightening credit."

Ummm... Doesn't this send a signal that the bank is having trouble? I think if this possibility were mentioned more often in public, the practice would stop!

More farewells: I almost can't look at the Valdosta paper any more without seeing the obituary of someone I knew while growing up there. During the past month Valdosta has said farewell to George Brogdon and V. B. McLain, both in the real estate business in the 1960s, both friends of my parents. The late Mrs. Alice McLain was one of my mother's closest friends, and my first knowledge of Christian doctrine (as opposed to "Bible stories") came from a book that she gave us around 1966.

Speaking of which, in my opinion, theologian Francis Schaeffer hits the nail right on the head when he says that one of the problems of "the middle-class church" is the dumbing down of Sunday school, so that children are taught things that frankly don't turn out to be true, or don't even make sense, or (most commonly) turn out to be silly platitudes, as they grow up. At age nine, I didn't want more "Bible stories." I wanted to know what God had to do with the universe and with me.

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Short notes

I have outlived another of my contemporaries. Today's Athens paper contains the obituary of Dixie Dowis McGinty, who was one of the more entertaining characters taking undergraduate linguistics courses at UGA in the 1970s. I haven't seen or heard from her since student days, but she went on to marry someone I almost knew from Moultrie (my aunt worked for his father), became a faculty member at Western Carolina University, and authored a book. Mediâ vitâ in morte sumus...

Why you can't furlough faculty: The University wants to include a clause in next year's contracts giving them the right to "furlough" us for a few days per semester if they have budget problems. That won't work, for many reasons. Among them: (1) We can't cancel classes without imperiling the University's accreditation. (2) Our job productivity is judged year-by-year, not day-by-day, so we'd be fools to actually stop working. (3) A school year minus some "furlough" days would not be enough to count as a year toward retirement. Putting everybody a year farther from retirement would, in the long run, be very costly to the University.

Just call it a pay cut. That's what it would be.

Electronic trivia: Here (as part of piclist.com) is a handy collection of useful information about prototyping electronic circuits. And here is how they made integrated circuits (of a sort) in the 1920s.

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Lulin continues to retreat

Comet Lulin is now a faint 8th-magnitude object. This is a stack of three 5-minute exposures, with the same equipment as the pictures below, but more magnified. The blue color of the comet is genuine and typical; the human eye does not see much color in comets because they are so dim.

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Horsehead Nebula

This magnificent panorama is a stack of 6 5-minute exposures with the same equipment as the Rosette picture posted yesterday. In it you see all three kinds of nebulae (interstellar gas clouds), reflection, emission, and dark.

The bright star left of center is surrounded by a small, thick cloud of white dust. That's a reflection nebula. The big red swath consists of emission nebulosity, thin clouds of hydrogen glowing by fluorescence. The complex nebula at the upper left is a mix of reflection and emission. And the horsehead-shaped notch is a dark nebula, a dust cloud in the foreground that does not have enough light shining on it to make it glow.

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The Rosette Nebula from Deerlick

Here is one of the fruits of my recent labors. Below is the Rosette Nebula, a stack of three 5-minute exposures, corrected with flat fields and dark frames, taken with a Canon 20Da kindly lent by Canon USA, an Astronomik CLS filter (probably not really necessary), and a Canon 300-mm f/4 telephoto lens, all piggybacked on a telescope with an autoguider.

I have a much higher-resolution version of this picture which I'll probably print out and frame.

The Rosette Nebula is a thin cloud of gas in interstellar space. It is so faint that it is hard to see with any telescope; its intricate structure is visible only in long-exposure photographs.

More tomorrow.

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Quick preview

I haven't had time to process the pictures from Deerlick, but here is a very quick rendition of one image, a single 5-minute exposure of the Rosette Nebula. A much better version of this picture is coming soon. This one is full of noise and specks.

Also note that yesterday's entry, about higher education, has been revised.

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The coming backlash against higher education

[Minor updates.]

For the past fifty years, the public has been strongly in favor of building up America's colleges and universities. I expect this trend to falter, if not actually turn backward, in the next decade or two.

There are many reasons, some good, some bad. Among them:

• Too many people are spending too much money on education, often with no clear purpose in mind, and ending up deeply in debt. They wind up angry at the whole process.
• A college education, especially one with no clear goal, often fails to increase a person's earning power as much as they expect.
• And a college education that is viewed as job training in a "hot" field can easily turn out even worse. By the time you hear that a specialty is "hot," there are already too many people in it.
• Too much of the public still fails to grasp that a university isn't just a continuation of high school. Research and public service are also part of its mission, and if they weren't, your professors would only be able to teach you what they read in a book, not anything they discovered or accomplished themselves.

WSB-TV has just done an exposé on how UGA "spends money to send people to play the trumpet in Italy" while apparently missing crucial points: (1) as far as I can determine, it was donated or grant money, not taxpayer money; (2) why should we be ashamed if our music professors get invited to perform in prestigious places? People from all over the world come here — why not the other way around?

Besides, "developing an international reputation" is part of the job description for the rank of Associate Professor and higher. And we're not supposed to pay for our own international travel — not on a professor's salary!

What should be done? I think the key to it is to keep people from feeling they must spend a fortune on a university education if they don't want or need one. I'd like to see high school curricula beefed up with real-world job skills, not just "college prep for everybody." Community colleges — low-cost two- and four-year public colleges — also need to proliferate. We need to return to the idea that free public education will prepare people for employment — as it did in the 1950s, fueling an economic boom.

The public needs to be more aware that colleges and universities exist on different levels and serve many purposes. Yes, the state's flagship institution does spend money on things that a community college doesn't. It also brings in grants and donations that a community college could never dream of. And it enriches the state, the nation, and the world.

Coming soon: Astrophotos. On the evening of the 22nd, I had a good trip to Deerlick. I'll have pictures posted in another day or two.

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Very short notes

I don't have time to write much because everybody in the world is sending me e-mail. Or, at least, everybody around the University has suddenly realized that the semester ends in six weeks and we'd better do some work!

Whatever Obama is, he's not a socialist, according to this essay by a distinguished economist. That doesn't mean he's right, of course, only that "socialist" is not the right name for what he is.

I've often mentioned "Christian money management" books; here is a good Jewish one (Thou Shall Prosper, by Rabbi Daniel Lapin). One theme in it is that (having been excluded from the medieval European aristocracy) the Jews don't have what Michael Novak calls aristocratic prejudice. That is, they don't have the notion that earning money is slightly shameful or that rich people shouldn't get their hands dirty by doing actual work. So they buckle down and do useful and profitable things while the rest of us are worrying about the public image.

Another theme is that your income is an indication of whether you're doing things other people want done. The other people might not be especially wise, of course, but if you're earning money, at least you know you're pleasing somebody. Though I haven't read the whole book yet, I don't know of anything in it with which Christians should disagree.

Speaking of religious things, if you are interested in Bible translations, look at this web site, which gives you the Bible in English with detailed notes from the translator.

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If you thought you liked Ayn Rand...

If you thought you liked Ayn Rand — the mid-20th-century pop philosopher and novelist who espoused free-market capitalism, atheism, and a theory of ethics derived entirely from enlightened self-interest — read this. (Even though it's from the Democrats.)

The bottom line is that Rand's political philosophy was nothing like anything normally found on the American spectrum, neither left nor right. She didn't like conservatism, libertarianism, or "family values."

In the 1970s it was not possible to be an adolescent with intellectual pretensions without being introduced to Ayn Rand. I sampled one of the novels and some of the philosophy, concluded it ran rather shallow, and was not drawn in.

Rand's "objectivism," as a timely reaction against existentialism and relativism, gets a number of things spectacularly right. Unfortunately, it then proceeds to get even more things wrong! It could be argued that she never threw off enough of the Communism that she thought she was rebelling against — she changed some of the central doctrines, but not the mindset.

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Lulin retreats

Comet Lulin is on the retreat now... This is a single 3-minute exposure with a Canon 40D and 300-mm lens at f/5.0, with a dark frame subtracted in the camera. The bright star is Delta Geminorum. This is the area of the sky in which Pluto was discovered in 1930.

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Star cluster M67

Using the same technique I got this quick shot of star cluster M67 in the constellation Cancer. This is a neglected cluster because a much larger cluster, M44, is nearby. If it were anywhere else in the sky, it would be considered a showpiece.

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Short notes

Econ-observation of the day: Read this. Through much of the 20th century, the Case-Shiller housing price index, adjusted for inflation, has been nearly constant. It dipped low in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, then came up somewhat and leveled off after WWII. Then it skyrocketed around 2006 in the "bubble." And it has not yet come down to what appears to be its long-term natural level.

(Afterthought: Your house may well appreciate faster than inflation, even though the average cost of housing doesn't, because any particular existing house is likely to become more in demand as development around it continues. Yesterday's outskirts are today's midtown.)

No, I didn't forget St. Patrick's Day. Look for something green in yesterday's entry. Found it yet?

Most inflammatory thing I've said lately: "I don't trust the (underground) marijuana industry any more than I trust the tobacco industry." That really got the NORML crowd riled up. It may have been a very small crowd; it was an online forum and I don't know if all the obviously fictitious names actually denote different people.

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Writing, or rather scrolling, a RichTextBox can be really slow

[Update:] I should add that the following notes are about the RichTextBox component in .NET Framework 3.0, accessed from C#. If there is a rich text box component that doesn't have these quirks, I'd like to know about it.

Today (March 16) I sped up a computer program by a factor of more than 200, merely by having it write its output onto a disk file instead of into a text window (RichTextBox) on the screen.

The program would have written about 200,000 lines of output into the box. That's a lot.

And, crucially, I found that the time needed to write a line into a RichTextBox is proportional to the amount of text already there.

This is only the case if you are scrolling to the end — as I always do, so that the newly written text will be visible. If you just want to add text without doing any scrolling, things go much faster.

I did some tests. I wrote a program to write multiple lines into a RichTextBox and keep track of the time elapsed, like this:

The code in the program that did the writing was this:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    DateTime t = DateTime.Now;
    for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
    {
        TimeSpan ts = DateTime.Now - t;
        richTextBox1.AppendText(i.ToString() 
            + " lines written, time = " 
            + ts.TotalSeconds 
            + "\n");
        richTextBox1.ScrollToCaret();
        Application.DoEvents();
    }
}

Then I used Excel to graph the results:

Writing 100 lines, totaling about 3300 characters, took about 0.2 second. That's an eon on a fast computer. My dual-core CPU runs at 1.8 GHz, so 0.2 second comprises 360 million clock cycles, or many tens of millions of CPU instructions.

Putting it another way, the output rate is about 16,000 characters per second, or 160,000 baud. The original IBM PC could supposedly do 1000 characters per second, in text mode (without windowing), using a CPU 1/400 as fast. Surely we've come farther than that...

And those numbers aren't just big, they're nonlinear. The curve in the graph shows that the time needed to write n lines is roughly proportional to n². This is equivalent to saying that the time to write each line is proportional to the number of lines already there. On my particular computer, writing n lines takes about 2n² microseconds.

That means writing 200,000 lines — as my program was originally going to do — would take 22 hours! (Or maybe a little less; it's not a perfect square-law function, but it's close. Also, I'm assuming that the average line length is the same everywhere, which it won't really be.)

Taking 22 hours to write the log while doing a 30-minute computation is unacceptable. The moral? Avoid writing large amounts of text into a RichTextBox, especially if you want to scroll to the end afterward. Programs that write logs into RichTextBoxes (including mine) should have the option to suppress most of the output if the log is going to be lengthy.

Incidentally, I don't see why it has to be proportional to n². Clearly, every ScrollToCaret operation involves making some kind of pass through all the contents of the box. Surely the computer could know that there have been no changes except at the end, and could append material there and scroll to it in constant time.

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Two short notes

Today (Mar. 14) I coded a go to statement in a C# program. Will I burn in Purgatory for it? Of course not. I know that go to's are error-prone, but in a few rare situations, something else is even more error-prone. If you never code a go to, you probably don't know quite enough about computer programming.

Artlite, in Atlanta, is about to sell a collection of new-old-stock (unused, 25-year-old) fountain pens. (Note their new location, beside the Home Depot on Piedmont at Sidney Marcus Boulevard.) A few days ago they sold me a vintage Pelikan 600 for far less than the normal price today, and it has the older, more flexible nib.

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About corn-free Coke...

One interesting thing I've noticed about corn-free Coca-Cola is that although it has the same number of calories and tastes slightly better, it is somehow more filling or more satisfying than corn-sweetened Coke. I find myself not wanting quite so much.

I suppose this is because sucrose (cane sugar) requires digestion while corn syrup (half fructose and half glucose) is partly usable immediately. So the sucrose would be expected to deliver the calories a bit more slowly. I'm just speculating, and I'm aware that there is bitter debate as to whether corn syrup is bad for us.

There has been talk that post-1980 (corn-sweetened) Coca-Cola is made blander so we'll drink more of it. Maybe that's another way of expressing what I'm observing.

I'll stock up on yellow-cap Coke while it's in season. Also Pepsi Throwback if I can get it, and if Pepsi will refrain from sponsoring extraordinarily bad taste on TV.

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Short notes

Orthographical correctness: I'm glad to say I scored 100% on this spelling test. I'll bet you won't. But if you can't do at least 50%, let me suggest that you brush up a bit...

Squirrel tech: How do you get a string up into a tree so you can use it to hoist an antenna? The latest issue of QST reports a trick that worked: Take an acorn and attach a small weight with a fishing line tied to it. A squirrel will carry it up into a tree, and the odds are, when he takes it apart, the weight will fall on the opposite side of a major branch. (If not, just do it again.) Then you have a piece of fishing line looped over a tree branch, and you can use it to pull the antenna up. (Yes, it was in the April issue, but there was no specific mention of April 1.)

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Real Coca-Cola

Connoisseurs will want to note that from now until April 15, you will be able to get genuine Coca-Cola at some grocery stores, sweetened with cane sugar (as it should be) instead of with corn syrup. The Jews don't eat corn during Passover.

Look for the yellow cap (not the white cap, which is kosher but not corn-free) and look at the list of ingredients. And enjoy!

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Now I'm "Cov"
A list of 200 celestial objects

I've just learned that the list of my 200 favorite celestial objects in Celestial Objects for Modern Telescopes will be included in the soon-to-come advanced edition TheSkyX with the designator Cov (thus "Cov 1", "Cov 2", etc.). I'm working on the database now...

Several software packages (including TheSky) have included it for a long time, under the name Covington. You can download it, in various formats, here.

The Covington object list is handy in at least one way: It covers the whole sky in just six big sweeps, so except when you hit the end of a sweep, objects with consecutive numbers are close to each other. That means you can view them in order.

But this list is not intended to replace others (NGC, M, C, etc.), and I don't even know the "Cov" designations of objects myself. The only reason the list is numbered at all is so that it can be integrated with software.

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Uptick, mark-to-market, and all that

[Updated.]

Amidst today's (March 10th) stock market rally, we keep hearing about proposals to reinstate the uptick rule and change the mark-to-market rule. Having spent some time trying to find out what these things are, I record that hard-won knowledge here...

The uptick rule has to do with short selling, which is the practice of selling borrowed stock. If the price of X Corporation is falling, you can make money by selling shares of X that you don't own, then buying them later on the open market in order to deliver what you've sold.

The uptick rule, which goes back to the Great Depression, says that you can only do a short sale at a moment when the price of the stock has just risen slightly (an "uptick"). In other words, you can only sell a stock short if its price is fluctuating, not if it's going straight down.

The uptick rule was repealed a few years ago, but experts are now convinced that short selling on downticks contributes to stock market crashes and the rule should be brought back.

Now what about mark-to-market? The reason so many banks are doing so badly today (on paper) is that they are required to value all their investments at current fair market value. This can be a problem. If the market for a particular kind of investment (such as mortgage-based securities) temporarily crashes, the bank ends up looking worthless — even if the investment is going to recover its value.

In essence, the mark-to-market requirement ignores the fact that an investment has no real value except at the time you're ready to sell it. When you're not ready to sell it, its "current fair market value" is a misleading number. (If it's a security that matures at a particular time — so that it's hard to sell prematurely — then its "current fair market value" is very misleading.) As a result, some experts propose modifying the mark-to-market accounting rule.

Doug Downing reminds me that the mark-to-market rule was set up in response to the savings and loan crisis 20 years ago, when financial institutions were overstating the value of their assets. So we probably don't want to ditch it entirely.

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More economic factoids

This is news? The credit card industry is bracing for a bad year. After a decade of lending money to people who can't pay it back, yes... But I want to see some careful regulation to make sure innocent customers aren't squeezed.

Software downturn already over? Here's some anecdotal evidence that the downturn for the software industry bottomed out in December or January. And this squares with something I've been hearing all over: Businesses that produce workable solutions to real problems are doing OK. What you can't sell any more is frivolity, status symbols, and "bling."

Ah, to be in England, now that spring is here, because the exchange rate from pounds to dollars is down below 1.4, but prices over there haven't risen. That means a night in a good hotel in Cambridge (for instance) costs US $150 instead of $220. I don't have an immediate need for a trip... What I hope is that this exchange rate fluctuation doesn't eat up my book royalties. I'm not sure whether the U.S. sales of my British-published books are converted into pounds before being converted back into dollars, and if so, when and for how long the money remains in pounds. Hmmm...

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Is it written for a beginner or an expert?

The other day I attended IEEE SoutheastCon and presented this paper. The key idea is that I have a method to determine whether documents (such as web pages) are written for beginners or experts. I'm not measuring "reading level" but rather the complexity of the ideas and the density with which they are packed together.

That's a sample of what I do at the office.

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Did just a few cities sink the nation?

Here's an economic datum that caught my eye: High foreclosure rates are confined to densely populated urban areas, especially the fast-growing fashionable ones. Make of this what you will. Note that the map is plotting the rate (mortgages divided by population), so it should not look any different in big cities than out in the country. But it does.

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Short notes

Internet Explorer is no longer crashing or hanging on me. The fix was probably a recent update to Adobe Flash. [Update: It's not entirely fixed, either. It still hangs occasionally, especially when viewing Reuters.] [Further update: I'm not sure the computer on which observed the problem had actually received the update yet. The jury's still out...]

Speaking of Flash, look at this web site. Great place to buy a mattress — but the web site is all in Flash, so Google can't see much of it, and indeed, how to use it is a guessing game! We're buying a mattress from them; apparently the lack of web traffic (due to the impenetrable web site) helps keep prices low.

I am gratified to see that Snopes has nicely taken apart an annoying "riddle" (actually a non-riddle — it circulates in a form that doesn't make sense). This is the one about words that end in -gry. As a linguist, I get asked about it with some regularity. And what it proves is that people will circulate a riddle even if it doesn't make any sense. Some people just enjoy being puzzled!

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Unexpected question marks in ASCII files written by C# programs

Here's the pesky technical puzzle of the past couple of days: Why do some ASCII files written by C# programs contain question marks in places where they shouldn't?

The answer is threefold: (1) characters aren't bytes, (2) ASCII isn't necessarily ASCII, and (3) characters can be invisible.

Start with the first. In days of yore, a character was one byte (8 bits) and there were, at most, 256 possible characters. The first 128 of these were ASCII, and the second 128 either didn't exist, or were a proprietary additional set defined by the computer manufacturer. Every definition of bytes as characters is called a code page.

Nowadays, in C#, Java, and related languages, a character is 16 bits, and there are more than 60,000 possible characters. That's how we accommodate Spanish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, and other languages, as well as mathematical symbols. Each character is stored as one or more bytes in a text files; methods of doing this are called encodings. UTF-8 is one of the most popular; it stores ASCII characters the same way as always, but provides multi-byte representations for the higher characters in the set.

The second point: ASCII isn't necessarily ASCII. We commonly think of a text file as plain ASCII if it renders the first 127 characters as single bytes in the normal manner. But in fact, if it was created in Windows, it is likely to be either Unicode UTF-8 or the older Windows ANSI code page (1252). If it was created under DOS, it's probably the "OEM" character set (437).

In C#, the encodings for these are, respectively:
Encoding.ASCII (strictly the bottom 128 characters, nothing else)
Encoding.UTF8 (modern Unicode extension of ASCII)
Encoding.GetEncoding(1252) (Windows ANSI)
Encoding.GetEncoding(437) (DOS extended ASCII)
Encoding.Default (whatever your OS prefers, depending on your region!).

In America, if you ask for Encoding.Default or specify no encoding, you get 1252. But that may be different in other parts of the world.

The third point: Characters can be invisible. Plain ASCII doesn't, but most extensions of ASCII include, for example, a "non-breaking space" for word processing — a character that prints as a blank but does not allow a line break. In 1252 and Unicode, it is character hex A0. Methods like Char.IsWhiteSpace() process it correctly.

And that's where our problem came from. Encoding.ASCII can only render the bottom 128 characters. Everything else prints as a question mark, even if it was intended to be a non-breaking space.

The bottom line: Don't use Encoding.ASCII. Files coming from Windows that are purportedly ASCII are really 1252. Sometimes you will get UTF-8 files. Either of these encodings, 1252 or UTF-8, will accept a pure ASCII file perfectly if one happens to come along.

For more about this, click here.

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Is high inflation the way out of our troubles?

Here is a Harvard-educated economist who thinks so. Here is more of what he has to say. The idea is that, by lowering the value of the dollar, the government should "discourage 'money hoarding,'" i.e., force people to invest in stocks or property.

Hmmm... Isn't it a form of theft if you debase the money that is in people's hands? Or am I too naive about this?

On the other hand, people who are in debt (i.e., Americans) can benefit from unexpected inflation if their salaries go up and their interest rates don't. You only want the dollar to retain its value if you actually own a net positive number of dollars!

The author of those blog entries advocating inflation is apparently a Galbraith liberal, but he claims support from Greg Mankiw, who is a political conservative. But in fact Mankiw is advocating an inflation rate of only 3%, which, according to Bernanke and others, may actually be a nearly flat price level (because the CPI arguably tends to run high). That is, Mankiw is advocating "no deflation" while Harless is advocating at least 5% real inflation.

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Another book, after all these years

My doctoral dissertation, Syntactic Theory in the High Middle Ages, is being reprinted by Cambridge University Press after all these years. This came as a complete surprise — I didn't prod them to do it. They originally published it in hardback 25 years ago, and now, voilà! it lives again.

This book has nothing to do with computers, nor astronomy. It is a study of a group of medieval Latin grammarians and logicians who wanted to work out a theory of the relationship between language and meaning. You can view some sample pages here.

Indirectly, this work was the source of a family of dependency parsing algorithms that I put to good use later on.

Click here to buy this book from Amazon.

Recent Daily Notebook entries have been updated. The updates will continue.

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The blizzard of '09

Just a quick note, uploaded via a slow Internet connection: We got a whopping NINE INCHES of snow (as measured at my house), one of the heaviest snowfalls Georgia has ever had. Because, at most, one or two inches had been predicted by even the most alarmistic forecasters, nobody was prepared. Trees have fallen over and knocked down power lines all over the region. For the second night without electricity, Melody and I bailed out to a hotel, from which I am uploading this.

More news (and pictures) soon. If I don't seem to be answering my e-mail, now you know why.

[Update:] The snowfall was very uneven; some people in north Atlanta were wondering what all the fuss was about, and even a few miles from my house, some places got only a couple of inches. But my home on the southwest side of Athens seems to have been Ground Zero. This was, I'm told, the heaviest snowfall since 1942.

As of Tuesday morning, we have electricity (though part of the town still doesn't) and the University has reopened.

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No what in our noodles?

These pictures speak for themselves — inarticulately.

These are apparently not a product of Organic Planet, San Francisco, but rather some other company using that name in Asia. And did they really mean "artificial intelligence" or maybe something else, such as "genetically modified crops"?

[Addendum:] Bruce C. Baker suggests that they meant "no artificial ingredients" and calls my attention to malapropisms, eggcorns, and mondegreens.

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In like a lion

Sudden, heavy snowfalls are quite rare in Georgia, but here's the fruit of three hours' "winter weather" this afternoon (March 1); yesterday the temperature hit 60, but now it's just below freezing.

Northern neighbors please note that snow at 31 F is a lot messier than at 20 F because it doesn't stay powdery; it refreezes into a solid mass and coats trees, power lines, and roads. Indeed, on the scanner radio I'm hearing many reports of fallen trees and power outages.

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