Various people on the WWWeb have used the word peosis or peotic. In all the cases that I have examined, these uses appear to be typographical errors, with the intended word being poesis or poetic.

FWIW, the word πέος is Greek for membrum virile. Thus, for example, wax peotic would be equivalent to wax penile.

On the title page of a translation of one of my father's books, I read

Aus dem Amerikanischen

Mind you that no elevators, automobiles, or bums appear in the book, and discussion probably doesn't get to a thousand million of anything. Perhaps a motion is tabled.

All these experiments, however, are thrown completely into the shade by the enormously extensive investigations of the Swiss astronomer Wolf, the earliest of which were published in 1850 and the latest in 1893. In his first set of experiments Wolf completed 1000 sets of tosses with two dice, each set continuing until every one of the 21 possible combinations had occurred at least once. This involved altogether 97,899 tosses, and he then completed a total of 100,000. These data enabled him to work out a great number of calculations, of which Czuber quotes the following, namely a proportion of .83533 of unlike pairs, as against the theoretical value .83333, i.e. 5/6. In his second set of experiments Wolf used two dice, one white and one red (in the first set the dice were indistinguishable), and complete 20,000 tosses, the details of each result being recorded in the Vierteljahrsschrift der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Zürich. He studied particularly the number of sequences with each die, and the relative frequency of each of the 36 possible combinations of the two dice. The sequences were somewhat fewer than they ought to have been, and the relative frequency of the different combinations very different indeed from what theory would predict. The explanation is easily found; for the records of the relative frequency of each face show that the dice must have been very irregular, the six face of the white die, for example, falling 38 percent more often than the four face of the same die. This, then, is the sole conclusion of these immensely laborious experiments,—that Wolf's dice were very ill made. Indeed the experiments could have had no bearing except upon the accuracy of his dice. But ten years later Wolf embarked upon one more series of experiments, using four distinguishable dice,—white, yellow, red, and blue,—and tossing this set of four 10,000 times. Wolf recorded altogether, therefore, in the course of his life 280,000 results of tossing individual dice. It is not clear that Wolf had any well-defined object in view in making these records, which are published in curious conjunction with various astronomical results, and they afford a wonderful example of the pure love of experiment and observation.

The Windows partition on my computer has its own Linux .Trash folder for each account, which folder is not cleared when I select the Empty Trash option of the Trash icon of my Linux desktop. So I thought, Eh, I'll created some symbolic links in my home-folder, so that I can quickly access the /mnt/WindowsXP/.Trash-root and /mnt/WindowsXP/.Trash-daniel.

An amusing thing occurred when I tried to delete files from one of the .Trash folders with the GUI by opening the folder by way of the symbolic link, selecting the files to be deleted, and then using the Delete key.

The file is deleted, but it's replaced with a copy. Delete x.y, and it is replaced by x (copy).y; delete that and it's replaced by x (another copy).jpg, which would be replaced by x (3rd copy).y, and so forth.

(The same results obtain if one selects Move to Trash, but the result is a little less bizarre since one is then plainly telling the computer to move the file to a directory in which it is already listed.)

Convenient work-arounds are easy enough when I want to empty the whole .Trash folder by way of the GUI, but these symbolic links aren't nearly as useful as I'd hoped.

A while back, I got an offer from Washington Mutual Savings Bank; if I started a free checking account with them, with a deposit of $100 or more, then after a few weeks they would add $75 to that. I decided to take advantage of that offer, and deposited exactly $100. I have kept my prior checking account, and left the WaMu account dormant.

Perhaps I should have waited. Yester-day (after the original offer expired), I received a similar offer from them, only now the supplement would be $100. Having taken advantage of the old offer, I'm blocked from exploiting the new offer.

As the Woman of Interest notes, this increase to $100 is suggestive of desperation.

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Last night, in CVS/pharmacy, I saw multi-packs of sparkling water on sale — regularly $3.99, now $3.97. That's a discount of just barely more than ½%.

2ND NOTICE AGAIN

It appears that Dover Books thinks that Augustus De Morgan (d. 1871) was One of the twentieth century's great expositors of science.

This morning, at the post office, the fellow immediately ahead of me in line was a Germanophone, wrapping a surf-board in bubble-wrap and tape, in preparation for mailing it to Germany. A postal employee came out to examine the situation; and, when last I knew, the Germanophone was being told that the item was too large.

Where does one surf in Germany?

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I have complained in the past of the electronic Amber Alert signs at the sides of the highways being used to preach, as this causes people to develop a habit of ignoring them, which defeats the ostensible primary purpose of the signs.

On top of that, here was the message on the signs that I saw along I-805 and CA-163:

DONT TEXT
WHILE DRIVING
JAN 1ST

So, apparently, they're cool with people texting while driving for at least the rest of the month, and possibly again starting on the 2nd.

• eBay listing 360119465093
• eBay listing 360119465243
• eBay listing 360119465608
• eBay listing 370136164655

(I notice that the listings for tiogacentergeneralstore include several sets of listings rather like this set.)

I received this offer by e.mail yester-day: Every little bit helps, as I s'pose.