No sign of rank, nor painted shield,
Duke William bore on Hastings field,
But in a hauberk plainly dight
He looked like any other knight;
While from his pointed helm projected
A nose-piece that his face protected,
Revealing only cheeks and eyes --
It made him hard to recognize.

So when the awful rumour spread,
"The Duke has fallen -- he is dead",
And through the Norman host there ran
Cold-footed fear from man to man,
William some difficulty found
In proving he was still around.

"I live!" he shouted; but his word
Above the tumult went unheard;
Wherefore, though arrows came apace,
He thrust the guard from off his face,
To cheer his men and daunt his foes
With sight of his portentous nose;
And all the Normans gave a roar:
"Here comes the Conk -- the Conqueror!"

Now, had he borne a scutcheon famed
That by its cognizance proclaimed
Him Duke of Normandy -- none other --
He'd been spared a lot of bother.
But in Ten Sixty-Six A.D.
They'd not yet thought of heraldry.

Well, everyone, I hope you all had more fun with 2009 than I did.

Lift a glass at midnight, and here's hoping 2010 will prove immeasurably better for all of us.

Happy Thanksgiving, one and all. I'm sitting and writing this with my first spare moment today.

Our Thanksgiving tradition usually involves traveling to the home of another member of our combined families, there to catch up with relatives' lives and eat far too much stuffing. This year, though, we were going to stay at home, and a handful of relatives would come to us (our home is small). My lady wife loves to cook, and was really looking forward to preparing a full Thanksgiving dinner, complete with two kinds of homemade pie for dessert.

Guess who caught the flu, with fever spiking over 102?

Guess who actually prepared, cooked, and served this full Thanksgiving dinner, and cleaned up afterwards?

If you guessed (a) my lady wife, and (b) me, give yourself a prize.

She spent the day horizontal, alternating chills and fever, and keeping well away from food preparation. Thank goodness for her meticulous planning: everything I needed was bought, ready, and in place for me. It made it much easier for me to bring the meal together.

I had help from my sister-in-law, who has even less kitchen experience than I do. Together, we made it happen. And, if I do say so myself, it was a damn fine Thanksgiving meal.

With two kinds of homemade pie for dessert. ((smiles))

Those of you who are bored by heraldica should probably skip today's post.

So I've been trying, honestly trying, to update the Pictorial Dictionary so that every period charge includes a date, a family name, and a citation. I keep discovering charges I thought I'd covered, going back and re-doing. Given the Absolute and Utter hell my life has been these days, I think I'm making progress.

But I've been stuck on the enfield. It could easily be a Tudor monster, but for the life of me, I can't find a period example of its use. The many O'Kelly websites offer what purport to be examples -- the enfield being the O'Kelly crest -- but follow-ups show that, in every case, the claims are exaggerated.

I've been pointing this out, in my capacity as staff commenter to the SCA College of Arms. And then the most recent LoAR was published, citing a source that said the enfield was indeed found in period: "Heraldry" by Bedingfeld and Gwynn-Jones. (The claim is made again in a later book, "The Art of Heraldry", by Gwynn-Jones alone.)

And yet, neither book gave me a date or a family name. I confess I doubted.

So I wrote the English College of Arms.

And I got a wonderfully gracious reply from one Peter Gwynn-Jones, now Garter Principal King of Arms. In which he admits that, well, he can't track down his sources for the enfield, and it looks as though the statements in his books were perhaps more sweeping than accurate. We still have no evidence for the Tudor use of the enfield, or indeed anything before the 18th Century.

So, while I still don't have the period evidence I want, I have managed to find errors in the works of Garter King of Arms, which he has acknowledged, and which have vindicated me in my claims of non-periodness of the enfield.

Which, bizarrely, was quite the bright spot in my day.

Our offices are moving at the end of the month, so this week is being spent packing: papers, files, books, old travel records, all the paperwork that we never look at but need to keep.

And buried in the storeroom was a 3-gallon jug of mead that I'd set there, oh, three, four years ago. Dusty, air trap empty, truly disgusting looking. I was certain that it would be spoilt, turned to vinegar, unpotable.

Except we decanted a bit, and you know, it wasn't bad. Not great: a bit thin, and not really that much alcohol. But not ruined, either.

I think if I add another pound of honey, rack it, and let it sit for a couple more years, it might be worthy to share. And if not, well, it should make a nice marinade.

The things one finds when packing.... ((shakes head in wonder))

When I say everyone seems to want a piece of me these days, I'm only barely metaphorical.

A member of our church has a daughter... who, it turns out, needs a marrow transplant. There are a lot fewer registered marrow donors than blood donors, and they haven't yet found a match.

Last night, the church member mentioned this to my lady wife.

My lady wife mentioned that I'm a Universal Blood Donor.

One thing led to another.

So this Saturday morning, I'm going to a registry drive sponsored by the National Marrow Donor Program, there to give a cheek swab and a tube of blood. And we will see what we will see. I mean, even if there's still no match for the girl, there are plenty of other patients out there who need bone marrow.

At least there's no call for hair donors. I know I wouldn't be able to help in that regard.

I know everyone says life isn't fair, but I didn't expect it to be this unfair.

Kitty contracted H1N1 around Labor Day. She's been in hospital for three weeks. This is a young, energetic, active, powerful woman. The stupid swinery shouldn't have had a chance against her!

Today, the hospital neurologist determined there was no brain activity. The family is honoring Kitty's DNR order, and is removing her from life support this afternoon.

The family has specifically requested no visitors. Which does make it hard to comfort Kurt when he needs it most, dammit.

Kitty has been a good friend, and her death will diminish me. And the massive injustice of it all is something I intend to yell at God about, when next we speak.

In the meantime, I promised Kitty some heraldic artwork, and I am BY DAMN going to deliver. Not much else I can do, besides hurt.

I am preparing to go to Parents' Night at Jacob's high school, there to meet with his counselor and his teachers for the coming school year. I leave shortly.

And I can barely contain the effervescent joy of my anticipation for this ordeal.

Worker 1: Thanks, Worker 2, you're awesome. Sometimes.

Worker 2: "Sometimes"?!

Worker 1: (shrugging) Well, awe isn't sustainable.

There are two kinds of dogs in this world.

The first, when they see you petting another dog, say, "Pay attention to me too!"

The other, when they see you petting another dog, say, "Pay attention to me instead!"

(And let's face it, some people are dogs.)

(Yeah, let's talk about something else besides my disintegrating body for a while...)

So last night, JP and I went to the LA Geek Dinner. The last one, at least for now, since the organizer (a thirty-something self-described self-inventer) is moving on to other things. Basically, the dinner is a chance for geeks (specifically IT geeks) in the LA area to get together in a social setting. Possibly the only social setting that doesn't involve their jobs that they get, but let's not rush to judgment.

Afterwards, a talk by Dr. Charles Baltay of Yale University on some models of cosmology, the search for dark energy, and how that search keeps stumbling over new planet-like objects in the outer Solar System. It was an interesting talk, though a bit elementary.

So during the Q&A period, I simply had to ask what progress had been made in theoretical correlation between dark energy and Einstein's cosmological constant.

The unspoken context to the audience: See, there are the real geeks who know physics, and then there are bit-pushers like y'all.

Pretty much recovered from my back spasms a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was about time to resume the morning run routine. So I did, this morning.

There are no words to express how big a mistake that was.

Chiropractor scheduled for tomorrow.

Dammit.

Or at any rate, much, much better.

I did something trivially stupid Friday -- I don't even recall what I did, it was so trival and stupid -- which resulted in a wrenched back and, I suspect, a pinched nerve. Excruciating pain, enough to break down my manly stoicism and voluntarily go to the local ER.

Pain, plus pain meds, plus muscle relaxants, together had me flat on my back the entire weekend.

We managed to get an appointment with a local chiropractor, who specializes in sports injuries. I was a tad cautious, since I haven't been to a chiropractor in over ten years, and wasn't convinced of the necessity even then. But anything's better than pain, and I've never really been comfortable with relying on drugs.

Turns out I've had a signficant hip displacement for years, enough to make one of my legs shorter than the other. A bunch of alignment problems like that. The chiropractor laid me down on the table, arranged my limbs to his liking, said, "Now I'm going to roll you this way," and then pop pop crack SNAP!

Didn't fix the back problems, but made them tolerable enough to allow me to return to work. I've two more sessions with the man, and I'm really looking forward to them!

I will post some terms used in optical physics. I learned these years ago.

Calculus of residues: How to clean a bathtub ring
Catoptric: A feline eye
Conic section: Funny paper
Corona: Someone who does autopsies
Exit pupil: A retiring student
Flux: Past tense of to flex
Grand canonical ensemble: Ecumenical council
Harmonic function: Concert
Hypotenuse: Animal like a rhinoceros but without horn on nose
Len: Single-sided optical element (plural lens)
Normal solution: The wrong answer
Poynting vector: Redundant term; all vectors point
Spectra: Female ghost
Spin operator: Ferris wheel owner
Torque: Conversation
Ultraviolet catastrophe: Bad sunburn
Watt: Will you please repeat that?

Scrambling to get all my stuff together, seeing as I'm flying out tonight for an installation in St. Lucia.

I'll be gone for two weeks, so if I don't have internet access when I arrive, I'll talk to you all then. Try to stay out of trouble while I'm gone, okay?

I had my CT Angiogram this morning, a follow-up to my TGA last week. The scan covered my neck and head, the mostly likely spots for blockages, constrictions, fistulae, or whatever might have caused my incident.

It was interesting, and took less than half an hour. They did a baseline X-ray first, then injected me with iodine (the "contrast agent", opaque to X-rays) and scanned again as the iodine spread through my arteries, but before it had entered my veins.

The iodine caused a surge in blood pressure and a feeling of intense heat, but it quickly passed. Now I have to drink lots of water over the next few days to flush it out of my system.

I probably won't know the results until I come back from my trip.

(TLA = Three Letter Acronym.) Honestly, I blame engineers for all the TLAs surrounding us today. It used to be, in the physical sciences, a new discovery got a name. Subatomic particles got names like neutrino and quark, not NBP or FHC (you know, Neutral Beta-decay Product and Fractional Hadron Constituent). Astronomers bestowed names to pulsars and black holes, names that stirred the imagination and gave a clue to what the discussion was about. (Okay, sometimes the names weren't as imaginative as these, but even something as bland as Class IIa superconductor at least tells the listener what the discussion is about!)

But then engineers in general, and aerospace engineers in particular, got into the act, and we got the SST and the LEM and the SPS until no one knows what the heck anyone's saying without a cheat sheet.

By now the disease has spread back to the other sciences. So Pluto and Eris and the other outer "planets" are now TNOs (Trans-Neptunian Objects). Laser physicists are measuring light with unprecedented accuracy using BECs (Bose-Einstein Condensates).

And of course, the reason for this rant: after seeing the neurologist yesterday, it would seem I had a TGA incident on Sunday. TGA. Transient Global Amnesia. Which is medicalese for "Bruce had a brain fade and we don't know why, we don't know what caused it, and we don't know how to treat it, but we'll give it a TLA and hope you're impressed."

But don't worry, I had an EEG and am scheduling for a CTI. ((rolls eyes))

For some reason today, I recalled a story I heard many years ago, one of those lessons on thinking outside the box: a story of a high-school student in a science class, answering a question on a test, and absolutely determined not to give the blatantly obvious answer the teacher expected.

The question was, given a barometer, how to determine the height of a skyscraper.

The teacher wanted some riff about measuring air pressure difference at the bottom and top of the building.

The student kept giving any answer but that one. All correct answers, mind you, just not the one the teacher wanted.

There had been a list of possible answers, and I spent my drive to work this morning trying to reconstruct the list. I can't recall all the alternatives, alas, so I'm asking for help.

Here's what I could recall:

1) Drop the barometer from the top of the skyscraper, time how long it takes to hit the ground, and use s = gt²/2 to calculate the height.
2) Tie a rope to the barometer to make a pendulum, time the period of the pendulum at the bottom of the skyscraper and again at the top, and in principle determine the change in g, and hence the height.
3) Tie a rope to the barometer, lower it from the top of the skyscraper until it touches the ground, draw it back up, and measure the rope.
4) On a sunny day, use the barometer to count off the length of the skyscraper's shadow, measure the barometer's shadow, and use similar triangles to calculate the skyscraper's height in barometer-lengths.
5) And of course, the classic: Approach the owner of the skyscraper and say, "If you tell me how tall your skyscraper is, I'll give you this nifty barometer."

Any others?

ETA: Okay, we have a couple more, now.

2.5) Half-way between 2) and 3), above. Tie a rope to the barometer, lower it from the top of the skyscraper until it almost touches the ground, then swing it like a pendulum and time its period. Use the formula L = g(T/2pi)² to determine the rope's length, and hence the skyscraper's height.
6) At the top of the skyscraper, clap the barometer against the side of the building and wait for the sound of the clap to echo back from the ground. Multiply the elapsed time by the speed of sound and divide by two.
7) Transport the skyscraper to an airless asteroid. Throw the barometer off the top of the building with just enough speed to cause it to go into orbit, and time the orbit. Do the same at the bottom of the building, and use Kepler's Laws to find the ratio of the two heights. Don't forget to allow for the radius of the asteroid.

Writing a PG-13 sex scene is a good deal more difficult than it sounds.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm in general unimpressed by The Latest Flashy Technological Marvel, whatever it may happen to be. HDTV? It's a way to watch crappy content with even greater clarity. iPhone? Not so superior a phone, and the rest is just bling. I do own an iPod, but it's frankly of limited usefulness: kind of by definition, listening to it isolates me, which makes it (1) illegal while driving, (2) interfering at work, (3) impractical at home, and (4) risking a missed flight at airports.

But I confess to being intrigued by the Kindle. Not simply because of the possibility of taking much of my library with me wherever I go, but because of recent trade articles suggesting that magazine subscriptions (the Times, Scientific American, etc.) could someday be sent to the device. I rather liked that idea.

But the intrigue was short lived, once I looked into it. Could I display my own documents on the Kindle? Not on the current model, not directly anyway. Could it do anything else besides e-books? Not that I could see. Expandable? Nope. Apps? Nope. Was it even, technically, the best e-reader on the market? Well, Sony's looked better...

Only thing Kindle has going for it is 3G download of books from Amazon. Which is wonderful... until one realizes that most of the books I'd like to carry around with me aren't ON Amazon. Legh. Bossewell. Wagner. Parker. Siebmacher. Boutell. Dennys. And a host of others.

Once again, another bit of Tech-Geek Whiz-Bang that, in the end, fails to impress me. Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm a Luddite.