I've been to weddings with terrible DJs who mispronounced the name of the bride and groom. That seems like the one thing you should be able to get right.
A new-to-me wedding thing that this couple did was having no assigned seating for the dinner.
Tweety's mom really wanted us to do this. I was worried that it would be bad for the singletons and randoms at the wedding. But maybe they would just end up at a table together anyway, the same one you'd likely assign them.
A really great wedding band definitely trumps an iPod or a DJ
If DJ = some hired dude who plays songs off the checklist you filled out, sure. Anyone called a "wedding DJ."
I think we're pretty spoiled with DJ friends.
I think we're pretty spoiled with DJ friends.
Well, yeah.
Also most people don't have friends who do all the cooking for their wedding. Or provide the venue. Some people are lucky.
But no long, small-talk-ridden dinner with strangers
But why would your hosts, if they have assigned seating, assign you to sit at a table with strangers?
5: Old school table assigning goes for mixing it up. Worst is when they intentionally split up couples (although I've never seen that at a wedding).
I think I've only been to a couple of wedding with assigned tables, but I think maybe we had it at mine. At least I had an assigned seat at my wedding.
And if I knew smart things about moving more freight traffic from road to rail, this sentence would say those things.
I had the impression that the proportion of freight carried by rail was higher in the US than most other developed countries, at least as measured by distance x weight. The stats I'm finding via Google are all over the place, but it seems to be somewhere between 25% and 40% in the US, versus 8%-9% in the UK. This mainly seems to be the result of the need to transport large amounts of coal large distances, which is probably more of a factor in the US than anywhere else but China.
5: Maybe they don't have a bijection between cliques and tables.
Internal freight, probably, because the US is a large country - we don't transport stuff 1500 miles within the UK because we'd run out of room, and most of our foreign trade happens by sea, which is far cheaper than rail.
Seating arrangements come down to finding sparse cuts on graphs, which is NP-Hard. No wonder most weddings suck.
We're hearing we'll soon have a couple dozen trains a day carrying coal bound for the coast, and then China.
All the CO2 will be released in Asia, where it can't hurt us.
13: Right. Because of the Coriolis Effect.
What Stanley describes is fine but the full sit down dinner + no designated seating leads to misery.
11 occured to me more than once as we were planning our wedding. We did table assignments, and did mix it up (although we kept couples together), but tried to make sure that everybody would know at least a few of the people at their table.
The OP title has inculcated a Prince earwurm.
If your wedding RSVP sheet has MMPI, you could use that to sort by table.
We did not have assigned seating at our wedding because we are not control freaks.
Yes. People were more than happy to find their own seats.
I don't mean to sound dickish about it, but I just got back from a family reunion at my sister's place, where she was rather gung-ho about making people sit where she wanted them too.
If you have exactly as many chairs (and place settings) as people, herd seating can leave people (especially those who don't know many oyher guests) feeling left out, was our thought. Anyhow, it helped integrate the disparate groups a bit and was an entertaining opportunity to play low-stakes matchmaker.
If you have exactly as many chairs (and place settings) as people,
We had a good handful of extra spots, which also facilitated people floating between tables. A good time was had by all.
We had assigned seating largely to ensure that no one felt left out. Everyone had a blast but I don't think seating had much to do with it.
In our case, the two couples who had no reason to know anyone else at the party naturally gravitated to each other. Something similar to whatever seating plan we would have come up with emerged naturally from the crowd.
I like "Call Me Maybe". I listen to top 40 on Pandora at work, and I'm always happy when it comes on.
OT: Forgive me for going off-topic, but what is the standard wisdom about slugs again?
I just stepped out to the porch to turn the light on for my housemate, who is out, and stepped ever so briefly, barefoot, on what was clearly a slug. I was so grossed out that I swooped down and picked (pried it) up with my bare fingers and flung it off the porch. Then realized that my fingers had slime on them, so eww. Back into the house, wash hands.
My housemate had mentioned that he thought he stepped on a slug the other day when bringing a chair into the house.
What is it, now? You put out shallow plates of water, and they drown? Is there salt involved, or is that only if you're being cruel?
My policy on slugs is to pick them up with a stick and fling them into bushes behind my house.
I really hate driving on hilly highways packed with semis
I-81, right? I hate that road, full of trucks going to or from Carlisle PA, the warehouse capital of the East Coast.
There are competing proposals to widen I-81 to accommodate the existing traffic or to run several sets of train tracks beside it or in the middle of it. The trains would be hugely more efficient, both in construction costs and operating costs. Guess which proposal is winning.
This isn't helpful, guys. I think there's a thing about putting out shallow dishes of water or something. Okay, I'll look it up myself.
You put out shallow plates of water, and they drown?
Shallow pales of beer. Beer is a slug magnet. Maybe they like the smell or something.
Although, be aware that you will then be confronted with the problem "what to do with plates of stale beer and large quantities of dead slugs." It is one of the least appetizing combinations known to humanity.
Somebody told me that beer is a great slug magnet such that you are drawing in more slugs to the extent that is might make things worse, horticulturally speaking. Full disclosure: I wasn't paying very close attention to whoever was saying this.
Beer, yes, thanks, Spike. My housemate got home and I related this to him, and he noted that there are a lot of slugs "marching", as he put it, around the bases of the bean plants. Maybe it will all go away of its own accord, but right now it seems like it might be something we want to do something about.
I'm taking 35 under advisement. I wouldn't want to actually attract slugs to the neighborhood.
If there's a few specific plants or a garden, I'd suppose you put three or four or more beer-laden plates around them. As long as they don't pass the plant on the way to the beer it should work.
You could check whether you have created some nice slug shelters where they are hanging out during the day, like empty flower pots, and get rid of them.
I think the local Audubon chapter has recommended putting out dishes of beer, but I wasn't paying very close attention to my Facebook feed.
I want to link to the Gary Larson cartoon "Kids! The slugs are back!" but I can't effortlessly find it online.
A different Larson slug cartoon.
You could check whether you have created some nice slug shelters where they are hanging out during the day, like empty flower pots, and get rid of them.
Oh, huh. There, uh, might be a few of those. Good point.
When I put beer in my strawberry bed, eventually the number of slugs petered out; I think I got most of them, and reinforcements did not arrive. But this was in a raised bed, and may not work as well if you are in a situation with an unlimited supply of nearby slugs.
Further to 41: I just mentioned the flower pot thing to my housemate, who basically laughed (patiently) and said that there are slugs all over the place in the yard, so it's not any flower pots that are harboring them, and he thinks I'm overreacting.
He's right. Sorry. It's just because of the one I stepped odn.
You step on one slug and the rest come to get you.
I don't feel the need to destroy all slugs, and I'm not really afraid of them (the way I am of, say, bees and wasps). Anyway, now I feel silly.
You can always get chickens to eat the slugs.
Odn has trouble stepping on slugs 'cause of the eye.
We had assigned seating at our reception. We also had particular guests whom it was considered prudent to keep separate from other particular guests for as long as possible, though.
We had slightly too many people for the space at our wedding, and having tables with stray unused seats, because there'd essentially be no place for small groups to sit down eventually.
33: Shallow pales of beer. Beer is a slug magnet. Maybe they like the smell or something.
It's because of the gluten. Slugs are gluten-intolerant, but like so many people, they tend to gorge themselves on it, erroneously believing that they are eating healthily by avoiding fat and cholesterol. On the veldt, you couldn't have tricked the slugs that easily, because they were vigorous, hardy beasts. Now, look at them: slimy, etiolated, mere shadows of their former greatness.
We have assigned seating in my house all the time. No assigned places for slugs.
All God's critters got a place in the choir.
52 is great, but wouldn't Halford have placed the blame on the carbs in beer rather than the gluten?
22 is not dickish, it's just wrong. 23 is accurate. Many people have social anxiety and will hesitate to join a group of people they don't know. Assigned tables eliminate a whole lot of wondering. (Also -- when you have friend groups that are bigger than one table -- someone's going to get left out, and better to be able to manage it beforehand.)
At Wedding 1 we were mad social engineers, and we had long tables with assigned seats. That's just bonus. Assigned tables is sufficient.
I had not heard that "Call Me Maybe" song before. It's okay, but the video is hilarious, especially the very end.
At a relative's wedding about ten years ago I was placed on a table with four of the bride's ex-boyfriends. The conversation was interesting, if barbed.
Ajay, I do wonder what you did to end up with all the exes. Were you part of a couple or just you? Seems like a weird purgatory. Just sayiin.
It wasn't just the four exes and me. There were about twelve people on the table. I think we'd just been loosely sorted by age.
People invite their exes to their weddings? That seems like it could go badly.
ksky's 56 is correct. I'm not exactly shy, but I felt like the new kid in the high school cafeteria at the last wedding I went to with unassigned seats. It was a college friend who had kept up with few others*, CA was the best man, and so every friend I had there** was seated at the head table. I was friendly with the groom's siblings,*** but was sensitive about taking up a seat at a table with them that might be better given to a family member, so I wandered around feeling uncomfortable for a while. It worked out well enough, like I am said, I'm not shy, and will pretty much talk to a tree stump if I have enough gimlets in me.
*Or rather he lost many of them in the "divorce" from his college girlfriend he'd dated for 12 years or so.
**The wife of another groomsman was a pal from Chicago, but she didn't stay for much of the reception since she had a tiny newborn with her. She breastfed the baby at the back of the church during the rehearsal and I have rarely seen looks as nasty as the those the mother-of-the-bride was shooting her.
***Well, some of his siblings. I started a fight about abortion at the rehearsal dinner party thing. Oops. It devolved into a sister-in-law saying, "I'm pro-choice. But for women who really need it. Not those sluts!" Good times.
61: I don't think the person officiating asks "If anyone has any objections, speak now or forever hold your peace" at a real wedding.
"I'm pro-choice. But for women who really need it. Not those sluts!"
"Stop pointing. That's a Sweet Sixteen party for the mayor's daughter."
Personally, I'd leave the slugs be. Then again, the only plant in my "garden", otherwise known as a balcony, is a year and half old Christmas tree that has started growing new needles at last. Woo!
OTFTTBIWMHB: Dewey LeBoeuf filed for Chapter 11.
*Off Topic for this thread but it was mentioned here before.
22: I am sure that if anyone had been anxious or annoyed they would have told you. That's ordinary practice at weddings.
I don't think the person officiating asks "If anyone has any objections, speak now or forever hold your peace" at a real wedding.
In a proper liturgical wedding they do, you'd better believe it. Contrary to romantic comedy lore, the purpose is not to reveal whether the bride or groom truly loves another, but to ensure that the pair is not enjoined from marrying by reason of consanguinity or bigamy.
People invite their exes to their weddings? That seems like it could go badly
They'd all been at school together. Mutual friends.
68: Maybe a Protestant thing? I've never heard it.
I am so using the acronym in 66 shortly once I've dug up all the responses the obesity research guy has written.
68: indeed. It's in the book for the Church of England:
http://www.bcponline.org/
But not, IIRC, for the Church of Scotland. The assumption is that any potential objectors will have been taken to one side and politely stabbed during the rehearsal the day before.
57: Thank you for the encouragement to actually watch that.
I don't think the person officiating asks "If anyone has any objections, speak now or forever hold your peace" at a real wedding.
They certainly do. It's an intrinsic part of the British civil ceremony and the Anglican/Episcopalian religious one. I'd be surprised to learn that it doesn't crop up in the generic Catholic ceremony - it was definitely asked at the Catholic wedding I went to in Ireland recently (everybody looked at each other, daring them...); and I've heard it asked by a Unitarian minister. There may be some bizarro-world American protestant denominations that omit it, but it's in there for good historical reasons.
Shit a lot of people got in while I was typing that.
There may be some bizarro-world American protestant denominations
Yes, yes there are.
The RC and COS services both include the couple themselves being asked "Hi! You look like you are about to get married. Want to continue? _OK _Cancel", but they don't throw the same question open to the congregation.
Maybe only English people and the fancier sort of American Protestants still feel the need to ask. Everybody else figures you can just email somebody about it.
The "objections" bit is not an intrinsic part of the civil wedding ceremony in England and Wales. The only legal requirements for the wording of the ceremony are those set out in §44(3) of the Marriage Act 1949 (as amended by the Marriage Act 1994):
44 (3) Where a marriage is solemnized in a registered building each of the persons contracting the marriage shall, in some part of the ceremony and in the presence of the witnesses and the registrar or authorised person, make the following declaration:--
"I do solemnly declare that I know not of any lawful impediment why I, AB, may not be joined in matrimony to CD"
and each of them shall say to the other:--
"I call upon these persons here present to witness that I, AB, do take thee, CD, to be my lawful wedded wife [or husband]":
(3A) As an alternative to the declaration set out in subsection (3) of this section the persons contracting the marriage may make the requisite declaration either--
(a) by saying "I declare that I know of no legal reason why I [name] may not be joined in marriage to [name]"; or
(b) by replying "I am" to the question put to them successively "Are you [name] free lawfully to marry [name]?"; and as an alternative to the words of contract set out in that subsection the persons to be married may say to each other "I [name] take you [or thee] [name] to be my wedded wife [or husband]".]
I can't believe [name] can marry himself in England. That's a bridge too far.
That is, the couple have to declare that there are no impediments--no-one else needs to be asked. Also, the couple and two witnesses must sign the register. The whole thing can be over in five minutes if you don't dilly-dally.
82: In addition to impediments, they also ask if it's a shotgun marriage. Not in so many words, of course.
80. Ah. I don't think I've been to a civil wedding since 1994. It was asked at ours, just before that.
All the weddings I've been to have been civil but the receptions sometimes get a bit rough by the end.
The civil wedding ceremony certainly can include other words at the option of the registrar; the only prohibition on what can be said is in §49(2) "No religious service shall be used at any marriage solemnized in the office of a superintendent registrar."
So, if the registrar thinks something funny is going on, he or she can ask if anyone knows why the marriage shouldn't happen?
re: 72
No rude or uncouth stabbings, naturally. It's a wedding!
82: In your telling, weddings in England and Wales sound just like sex!
87: The wording of the ceremony is agreed beforehand between the couple and the registrar. If the registrar suspects dodgy business, it's a bit late to do so at the ceremony. The time to raise concerns is when the certificate is issued. See §26-40.
82: You have two witnesses sign a register when you have sex? Well, whatever turns you on.
The civil part of my wedding took all of three or four minutes, not counting waiting for the Justice of the Peace guy to show up. It was absurdly quick and easy. Blam! your're married. Thankfully the divorce was almost as fast, with just a bit more paperwork and a few month waiting period, but the actual interaction with the court was maybe ten minutes.
No wonder most weddings suck.
I have been very lucky -- which is to say I've chosen my friends carefully -- and most weddings I've been to as an adult have been somewhere from enjoyable to delightful. (Our extended family isn't close, so I almost never have to go to weddings of relatives I barely know.)
We had slightly too many people for the space at our wedding, and having tables with stray unused seats, because there'd essentially be no place for small groups to sit down eventually.
I had to read this 3 times to make sense of it, and I was there.
heebie thoughtfully put us a table with other people who know her as heebie, so we weren't tempted to invent wildly differing accounts of how we became friends to see if anyone would demand the truth didn't have to spend the whole time inventing stories about how we knew her.
Assigned or unassigned seating doesn't lend itself to a general rule. If I'm at a big wedding that's local where I know 1 or 2 people besides the couple, I much prefer unassigned seating because it can be awful to be stuck next to a bore or an awkward person for a 2 hour dinner. If it's a smaller destination wedding where there's a hope that everyone will get to know one another, but there are a few strays that you're trying to integrate, assigned seating is probably best. As a general rule, I am in favor of avoiding the long sit down meal altogether; short meal, toasts, and then dancing.
Assigned or unassigned seating doesn't lend itself to a general rule. If I'm at a big wedding that's local where I know 1 or 2 people besides the couple, I much prefer unassigned seating because it can be awful to be stuck next to a bore or an awkward person for a 2 hour dinner. If it's a smaller destination wedding where there's a hope that everyone will get to know one another, but there are a few strays that you're trying to integrate, assigned seating is probably best. As a general rule, I am in favor of avoiding the long sit down meal altogether; short meal, toasts, and then dancing.
...inventing stories about how we knew her.
"You meet the best people at the court-ordered anger management classes."
If I'm at a big wedding that's local where I know 1 or 2 people besides the couple, I much prefer unassigned seating because it can be awful to be stuck next to a bore or an awkward person for a 2 hour dinner.
Wouldn't considerate friends assign you to the same table as those 1 or 2 people you know?
Also, it's pretty hard to have a wedding that truly "sucks" -- weddings are inherently fun, even when you don't know a lot of people. The only one I can think of that actually sucked was the one where the bride had told everyone she didn't want to get married and was doing it for the money. Good times!
99 -- you'd think, but often it doesn't work that way -- either the people you know need to be assigned to another table for some reason, or you know two people and end up as 3/8 of a table and are stuck talking to the bore you don't know instead of your friends.
I just made a list to try to remember all of the friends' weddings/commitment ceremonies I've been to and of the 16 couples I can remember only one is divorced (though I've lost touch with one and the husband is now a widower in another).
This makes me statistically unusual but not, I bet, unusual here.
it's pretty hard to have a wedding that truly "sucks"
No alcohol.
No alcohol, outdoor service in January in Minnesota, everyone in the receiving line gives you a knee to the groin.
The solution to the NP-Hard problem mentioned above can be approximated by relaxing the assumption that everyone must be at one and only one table. Fuzzy table membership can be assigned for maximum sociability.
My two close friends who are divorced or in the process of divorcing are also the two who eloped. I absolutely do not think that elopement means doom for a couple, but in these two cases, the reasons they eloped were definitely bound up with the reasons they ultimately divorced.
The wedding guests are dearly beloved, but the slugs are beerly deloved.
I've been to a dozen weddings or so, mostly Catholic, and they've all been great. We're now at the ages where people are having babies or divorces.
Just make certain anybody you hire to do music at a wedding isn't the sort to confuse Mendelssohn with the Horst-Wessel-Lied.
it's pretty hard to have a wedding that truly "sucks"
Not-great weddings don't usually suck, they're just boring, like any other party you attend more out of duty than desire. (Guests at the same wedding will have varying mileage, obvs.)
weddings are inherently fun, even when you don't know a lot of people
This really isn't true any more than it is for other parties. For lots of people without oudemia's magical combination of social intrepidness and gimlets, it's easy to feel like a dork and a wallflower. (I would have paid good money to have been at that rehearsal dinner, by the way.)
(I would have paid good money to have been at that rehearsal dinner, by the way.)
No need to be defensive. Nobody here has accused you of counterfeiting.
Put it this way: weddings where you don't know a lot of people are about 10x as much fun as going to other parties where you don't know a lot of people.
Basically people should freak out less, not more about their weddings and yes this includes freaking out about having your inclusive political eco friendly artisinal totally non wedding complex wedding. You're happy, people are happy to see you, there's family and friends, it's festive.
Who are you talking to, Halford?
It was definitely asked at the Catholic wedding I went to in Ireland recently (everybody looked at each other, daring them)
I am surprised at this; I don't doubt you in the least but I can't remember ever hearing it in real life & I have typed up wedding booklets for various family members.
114 -- Sir Kraab, mostly, but not to anyone's wedding here in particular.
your inclusive political eco friendly artisinal totally non wedding complex wedding
What we all reallly want to know is, does this kind of wedding have table assignments or not?
Actually,there's an easy answer: just follow everything done in the wedding in the film Rachel Getting Married, to the last detail, and you will have achieved the perfect SWPL wedding. Unless your guests have seen the movie, in which case all bets are off.
113.1: Not that this is an important debate we're having, but I'm not sure why you're so insistent that your experience is everyone else's.
113.2: Issuing proclamations of how everyone should do things, that I understand.
119: What if you don't have a sister who's a self-destructive narcissist? If you hire Anne Hathaway to stand in, do you have to pay scale?
I'm not sure why you're so insistent that your experience is everyone else's.
I'm not, really, just advocating for the freak out less school -- people who are starting wedding planning from the "most weddings suck" or "most weddings are boring" position will have a way way way more stressful time of it than people who start off from a default of "most weddings are pretty fun." Also generalizing wildly from unrepresentative experiences is kind of the point and fun of this place.
just follow everything done in the wedding in the film Rachel Getting Married
Having Tweety in blackface at the wedding would have been a step to far, I think.
121: If you're an indie wedding, you probably don't have to pay scale. The samba dancers will demand their usual rate, however.
Also generalizing wildly from unrepresentative experiences is kind of the point and fun of this place.
Speak for yourself. I'm here for the cock jokes.
122: Yes. Handing out Xanax like candy would probably not be malpractice in this venue.
I was sort of tan.
Until the photographers did that weird fashionable thing with the saturation and color balance.
Obviously, the whole wedding party should just go get spray tanned to the same shade to make it easier for the photographer.
I'm pretty sure I remember the bridesmaids being compelled to do 129 at at least one wedding I've attended, but I'm now not remembering the details.
The bride probably started in high school picking friends who were all the same height and two inches shorter than her.
An aunt of mine famously went to the wrong wedding, and knew no one. (She'd stayed in the parking lot to sew a button on a musician's jacket, while my uncle and cousins went on ahead to the right wedding.) She had a lovely time.
[cat noises] This was to the benefit of both weddings. Good thing they didn't have assigned seating. [/cat noises]
Obviously, the whole wedding party should just go get spray tanned to the same shade to make it easier for the photographer.
I DON'T EVEN SEE RACE.
I will be a broken record and repeat that I love weddings. But I hate attending them.
128, 133: We got family photos done by a friend of ours this weekend and he's having a hell of a time managing the color correction for the three quite different shades/undertones. I'm kind of curious whether a black photographer would have made different choices.
135: Subtle skin tones are difficult to get right no matter who pressed the button, there are many variables to tinker with. I've had reasonable luck by including a color checker card in a few shots but it can still be a pain.
Many people have social anxiety and will hesitate to join a group of people they don't know.
Our solution to the social anxiety problem was an open bar.
At my wedding, which was basically a lily-white Mid-Atlantic family mixing with a lily-white New England, my dad drunkenly walked up to two of my high-school friends - one black, and one a very dark skinned Indian - put one arm around each of them, and told them at length how proud he was that they had brought the diversity, thereby helping our family to one-up the new in-laws.
135: I really didn't mean to sound like I'm dissing my friend, who did an amazing job and will have done an even better one by the time he's done with color corrections. I just didn't have moments of "Whoa, what color is my FACE?" the way Lee did looking at some of the shots. (I did, though, have many, many moments "What the fuck is wrong with me that I apparently hold my mouth in a horrible pinched grimace all the time?")
Colour balance shouldn't be super hard although it can be tricky if the light is difficult. As Biohazard says, shooting a colour target can be useful, as can shooting a grey card to give you something to white balance from. You do really need to be shooting raw, though. A lot of cameras default to stupidly over-saturated jpegs,* and a lot of photo editing/raw conversion software may have presets that crudely bump the contrast and saturation, too.
* which a lot of people like, of course.
re: 128
I read a few blogs by people who do wedding photography and it is interesting to look at how fashions in colour and post-processing change over time. I see some that look great, and some that I can't believe people are proud of.
I've come around to liking what our photographers did with the color, but it weirded me out at first.
It was interesting to see what color my dress (a dark aqua) came out in different people's photos.
I don't know how it appears in photographs, but my face is getting all full of freckles this summer. Stupid sun.
You put out shallow plates of water, and they drown?
Having human voices wake them also does the trick.
138: "What the fuck is wrong with me that I apparently hold my mouth in a horrible pinched grimace all the time?"
The boss tends to do that. Disconcerting.
139: It's multi-ethnic/racial/whatever groupings that I find problematical. There's always at least one person's skin that comes out strange and needs special tweaking.
|| So, UNG's dad posted on Rory's Facebook page "Warm greetings, especially to your mother and the new baby." I am really tempted to comment, "Warm greetings to you, as well!" But it would be obvious I wasn't mistaken about whom he actually meant. |>
That I've restrained myself from posting a passive-aggressive response? Nope, totally serious! I'm growing! So far...
Just delete it. You've got her PW, I assume.
No, I meant about the "your mother" part. That's unbelievable. (And if someone had done that to me when I was Rory's age, it would have made me unspeakably angry.)
150: I do not. Because I respect her privacy and judgment. Unlike *some* of her mothers...
149: Good. Just leave her FB page alone unless there's a major danger to her to deal with. Let her grow up.
154: Ah. I'm behind the curve. Even better.
I figure if I play my cards right, maybe she'll eventually friend me with the real account she has, or will eventually have, unbeknownst to the Password Keepers.
Fine, but out of a sense of revenge, I'm going to miss a deadline on work I owe an Austrian.
Is that forbidden by your divorce agreement? It is by mine.
Your divorce agreement specifies Facebook rules?
Rod Coronado went to jail for 4 months for accepting a FB friend request -- just imagine if they'd caught him playing Farmville!
160: Nothing in our decree about Facebook. And to the extent it might be suggested that I should feel bad about the hypothetical undermining of their password rule, I would theoretically argue that I have no obligation to enforce rules the adoption of which I was not consulted on. But, let's be realistic. She's not tipping off her mom to any super secret FB pages that should arise, even if her mom is super cool as moms go.
I'm sure by next year FB will be part of the boilerplate, but no, use of "mother" or "father" to refer to anyone else.
But presumably you can't bind your ex-spouse's parents to that rule.
People invite their exes to their weddings? That seems like it could go badly.
Nah, it was great. Especially the part where I got them all in a room together and had the photographer take a picture before they figured out why they were there.
164: Oh, gotcha. Wish I/my lawyer had thought of that.
165: I imagine it would work like the anti-disparagement clause -- you have to take reasonable efforts to make sure others comply.
Warm greetings, especially to your mother and the new baby.
Very weird in all sorts of ways. He is posting on his daughter's FB page a greeting from himself to his wife and other child?!
164 is very interesting to me. Mara has been using "mom" to refer to her birth/first/biological mom and that's fine with both Lee and me, but today she (in her role as baby koala) wanted me to pretend to be [Mom's Fanily Nickname] Koala and I wouldn't do it without deliberate coaching because I feel like I shouldn't gve her a falsely positive view of what her mom did when Mara was a baby and she had custody but I also don't want to demonize her or give the impression she didn't do any parenting.
It's pretty obvious and non-threatening to me that she was and thus is Mara's mom, but I think that's partly ideological and partly a gay thing. It's easier to add another mom when there are already two on a daily basis, I think.
Ok, I was going to post this on the sports-thread that just came into being, but I didn't want to be implicated in an early threadjack.
||ATM: The Jewish Y is two blocks from me. It has fitness classes. There is some chance that I will go to a class where I would completely blow off self-motivated exercise, as I have been doing for thirty-eight years.
The point here is losing weight or anyway working toward losing an inch of real estate in the waist. The options: Pilates, something called NIA which apparently stands for Non Impact Aerobics (though at the Jewish Y I thought maybe it was a hip-hop outfit called Nazarenez In Attitude), Yoga is out unfortunately because Tuesday night is pub trivia, otherwise known as Where I Get the Gut I Am Trying to Lose, and something called Boot Camp--how could that go wrong?
I'm not doing Zumba. The name annoys me and I think it involves dancing and as George Jean Nathan apparently said, the lovely rhythms of the waltz should be listened to in stillness and not be accompanied by strange gyrations of the human body.
Any advice?
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I've attended a couple of Episcopalian weddings where, much to my disappointment, the officiating priest didn't ask the assembled to 'speak now or forever hold your peace.' I was expecting the liturgy to be all Book of Common Prayer, but I guess these ceremonies were sort of Anglican Lite. I really like the idea of that dramatic pause in the middle of the ceremony (and so do countless novelists, filmmakers, TV script writers, and etc., of course: it's a great plot device! and a good way to flush out the existence of a still-living spouse who has been hiding out as a madwoman in the attic).
I have never heard this done at an RC wedding, of which I have attended many (including my own). The Catholic thing is to publish the banns in advance, which gives mad spouses and their relations the chance to register their objections ahead of the ceremony. Which is probably more efficient, but far less dramatic.
D'oh. I started to specify that the Jewish Y has no crossfit. I trust I do not need to explicit-make the joke here.
Omg you guys there is something called the "RFD Network" that I've just been watching. I saw the Virginia Farm Report and the series "Cattleman to Cattleman" is set to record. They also feature a polka hour. How have I missed this.
Smearcase, do boot camp, but if the goal is weight loss you'll get there mostly with diet.
Sorry, that's cattlemen to cattlemen. Even sexier.
I saw the Virginia Farm Report and the series "Cattleman to Cattleman" is set to record.
I thought you hated agriculture.
re: 172 What Biohazard says in 179.
I'd guess (if what get called 'Bootcamp' type sessions here are similarly labelled in the US) it'll be circuit/interval training type stuff with a fair bit of bodyweight exercise/callisthenics.
Bravo, 166. Paul Simon salutes you with his sweet imagination.
I've attended a couple of Episcopalian weddings where, much to my disappointment, the officiating priest didn't ask the assembled to 'speak now or forever hold your peace.'
But have you been to an Episcopalian baptism where they ask the godparents if they renounce Satan and all his works?
180: And there's this guy in a funny hat screaming "You maggots aren't fit enough to be corpses! Faster! Move it!"
The Catholic thing is to publish the banns in advance
According to the pedia thing, your lot abolished the requirement for banns in 1983.
In the CoE, under the Marriage Act, 1754, which I learned yesterday has been superseded in this respect, you had to do both. Banns were called three times and the "cause or just impediment" thing was repeated just before the vows were taken in the ceremony.
This was all about preventing minors eloping or being kidnapped and forced to marry, which was a known way of avoiding bankruptcy in the early modern period.
If you could afford it, you could get round the banns by buying a special license (the upper classes, who preferred private weddings in the c18, favoured this process, which is why it was retained in the Hardwicke Act), so they left the question in the ceremony as a final safety valve in case you had i. kidnapped an heiress and ii. bribed a Proctor of Doctors' Commons to issue a license in spite of your twirling mustachios, but iii. the heiress' heroic lover burst in at the last moment, shouting, "Hold! I forbid the marriage!"
being kidnapped and forced to marry, which was a known way of avoiding bankruptcy in the early modern period
How does that work?
the heiress' heroic lover burst in at the last moment, shouting, "Hold! I forbid the marriage!"
Canonically (or rather Conanically), the conversation goes:
"You're too late; she's my wife."
"No, she's your widow."
BANG
But have you been to an Episcopalian baptism where they ask the godparents if they renounce Satan and all his works?
I had to do that at a Catholic baptism. Rather to my disappointment, I didn't have to renounce his pomps. He doesn't have any now, just "empty promises", which doesn't sound as good.
I still felt very Michael Corleone though. The feeling was intensified when the priest accidentally knocked the bible off the lectern and onto the floor with a terrific bang at around this point.
How does that work?
It's straightforward enough. You learn that somebody has issued a warrant to arrest you for debt and commit you to the Fleet, so you hire a couple of heavies to kidnap the 12 year old daughter of a Master of the Grocers' Company, rough her up a bit until she's willing to do what you tell her, and then pay an unemployed clergyman to marry you. That done, you go to your creditor and say, "Look, I can't pay you now, but my wife has expectations of £100,000, so I'll settle with you as soon as her father snuffs it. Interest? Of course, my dear chap, as much as you like..."
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NMM" Doc Watson. Sad,but he was 89...
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172: If Nia there is like Nia here, it's basically a dance class. But here I don't think they were claiming it was an acronym, so who knows?
In the CoE, under the Marriage Act, 1753, which I learned yesterday has been superseded in this respect, you had to do both. Banns were called three times and the "cause or just impediment" thing was repeated just before the vows were taken in the ceremony.
The Marriage Act 1753 provided for two ways to be married according to the Rites of the Church of England: "Marriage by Banns" and "Marriage by Common Licence". They haven't been superseded: you can still do either under current law if you can find a minister of the Church of England who is willing to officiate. (See §6-14 of the Marriage Act 1949 for Banns and §15-16 for Common Licence.)
The Marriage Act 1836 introduced a third way to be married (marriage under superintendent registrar's certificate) and allowed people to be married by any ceremony they pleased, provided that it was held between 09:00 and 15:00, and that the couple said the magic words and signed the register in the presence of the Registrar and two witnesses. (The building in which the ceremony took place still had to be a building used for religious worship, but this was later relaxed to allow marriages to take place in a registry office, and the 1994 Act allowed for "approved buildings".)
To get married in a Catholic church here, you have to produce a "letter of freedom" from the priest of wherever you have been living, to say that he hasn't married you to anyone. Hijinks can ensue for emigrants when the priest of some UK or US parish refuses on the basis that you never darkened their doors in the first place.
The CoE still had banns when Fleur and I attended. Fleur sure didn't like being known as "Fleur Nomdejeunefille, a spinster of this parish".
short meal, toasts, and then dancing
This reminds me of something else I liked at a recent wedding: the couple moved all the toasts to the rehearsal dinner.
195: thus ensuring that most of the guests didn't get to hear them??
|| fuck. I'm still up. and I have only today to do a rewrite of my contest submission spec script. WHY |>
Let Unfogged help you with that, k-sky.
172: Smearcase, I have a few guest passes to my (fancy) Manhattan gym if you'd like to try its wide range of classes to see what you might enjoy. They have one class organized around fencing with weighted practice swords, for instance. (Terrifyingly ripped but very nice woman instructor: "We call it a 'fitness stick' in class.")
OT: The New Yorker's "Science Fiction Issue" is a heap of the same old our-genre-doesn't-get-enough-respect tedious bullshit. One's opinion of Remnick and the gang declines incrementally. One did like Ursula K. LeGuin's anecdote about writing for Playboy, though.
"We call it a 'fitness stick' in class."
Laydeez...
"Welcome to the ... Lovenasium." Bow-chicka-chicka-chicka-wow-wow.
199.2: I kinda liked Gibson's. Boy was that Anthony Burgess thing bizarre, though. "You may have heard of my most famous novel. Now, I will make all of the themes and influences I had in mind when I wrote it completely explicit."
202: Well, the poor man has been dead for 10 years. It would be churlish to grudge him a little hedge against vulgar misinterpretation.
But really, would I be surprised to learn how common that is? Do writers of allusive, satirical fiction generally have a folder in the drawer labeled "THE SUBTEXT"?
The Subtext, by A. Fictionist. Coming Fall 2012 from Knopf.
Did he write about whether he intentionally structured the book in sonata form? I'm still annoyed with the TA for my first-year college class who thought my paper about this was bullshit.
Agreed with all the responses to 172. Neither Pilates nor yoga is going to help you lose weight very fast unless they're particularly kickass variants of those. "Non impact" also makes me think the aerobics class will not be particularly fat-burning.
Zumba is a weird concept. It's basically a Latin/Salsoul night with no drinking or drugs, spliced onto a bunch of joyless puritanism. I mean, if you need to dance, you don't have to make it into a hard time as an excuse.
As for Crossfit, having made some inquiries recently, I conclude that it's profitable.
The woman you reprobates call Lunchy is a big fan of Zumba. Based on what I have heard, like many exercise classes, it seems to be taught by no person outside the category of "petite, terrifyingly enthusiastic woman."
re: 'fitness stick'
Canne de combat people are among the most athletic people I've ever seen, in any sport. I don't know how they train for that -- although I've done a tiny bit myself, it's only at the numpty-level, with none of the jumping, squat splits and stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFqh4IKSA64
If you could afford it, you could get round the banns by buying a special license
Thanks for this, which has vastly increased my understanding of Heyer plots.
Fleur sure didn't like being known as "Fleur Nomdejeunefille, a spinster of this parish".
No disrespect to you or Fleur, but I don't understand what inducement belonging to a church could offer to make one put up with this kind of thing.
Spinster is an archaism, but I'm surprised people actually find it offensive. Do unmarried men resent being referred to as bachelors?
re: bachelor
I worked fucking hard for this doctorate!
Perhaps a clue can be found in the cultural non-associations of the term "spinster pad".
Or the existence of the term "bachelorette party".
See? There's the thing. If they had called Fleur a bachelorette of the parish, no problem.
Hey, remember what I was saying a while back about how feminine terms tend to pick up a pejorative sense? Although I actually don't really get having an issue with 'spinster' -- the idea that it would be pejorative to identify a woman as unmarried seems archaic in itself.
210: that's a pretty incredible clip. How do they score it? They don't seem to be stopping after a touche as they would in fencing.
OMG I totally live in a spinster pad! This is awesome.
217: over here we say "hen party".
Fleur Nomdejeunefille, hen of this parish?
218: I have never heard (or, more to the point, read, as the term is indeed sort of archaic) spinster used non-pejoratively, I don't think. I recall when I initially learned the word as a kid very clearly understanding it as having an implication not just of unmarried, but of unmarriageable.
Relevant! But surprising!
having an implication not just of unmarried, but of unmarriageable.
Much like the obituarists' favourite, "confirmed bachelor".
No disrespect to you or Fleur, but I don't understand what inducement belonging to a church could offer to make one put up with this kind of thing.
I would guess that sometimes belonging to a church brings friendships, a feeling of community, a feeling of solidarity, which outweigh the hurt caused by archaic terminology used for bureaucratic rituals.
223 I always thought that was a euphemism for gay.
re: 219
The judges are scoring hits, but it's continuous so they are keeping a running total [also additional points for style]. There are some artificial restrictions on scoring zones to encourage the athleticism and stop people just whacking each other. The cane has to strike horizontally or vertically using good technique [so no random whacking], and only to head, torso and legs below the knee. There's some limited concept of 'right of way' like foil fencing, but I don't understand the details.
That's a competitive bout, too, not a demo. In demos they do much madder and more gymnastic stuff. There's obviously a self-defence form which is much less flashy, too, and geared more towards just bashing people.
re: 219
I've learned the basic techniques -- just a couple of the strikes and parries. The way they load the strikes means the cane makes a really sinister whipping sound as the tip is moving _really_ fast, but the canes are very light so while it stings a bit, and could bruise without padding, it's not dangerous.
I don't understand what inducement belonging to a church could offer to make one put up with this kind of thing.
Ahem.
222. Very surprising to see "confirmed bachelor" still so high. I'd have expected it to drop sharply in the last 40 years.
Regarding the offensiveness of "spinster," it occurs to one that -- keeping to the archaic mode -- the alternative Book of Common Prayer-type terms for gal chick frail dame broad tomato doll ol' ball-and-chain never-married woman would be "maid" (as in "old"), "maiden" or "virgin," which wouldn't be much less potentially offensive.
I think "confirmed bachelor" generally has some connotation of agency by the bachelor (also a bit of 226, which of course implies agency). "Spinster" carried none of that as far as I can tell.
I have honestly never heard "confirmed bachelor" used other than as a euphemism for gay. I don't think it has any other meaning. Which is why I was surprised to see it register so high at a time when people who feel the need for such a euphemism might be thought to be dying off.
233: I think people still use it because it's funny. And, of course, there are still prominent closeted gay men to be euphemistically noted.
CA's parents' marriage license refers to his mum as "spinster."
227: ah, thanks. I remember right of way from my foil fencing days: five seconds of action followed by three minutes of discussing who had right of way. Continuous scoring would have been much more fun.
I think the deal with the pejorative sense was that it was insulting to identify a woman as both adult and unmarried; she was supposed to be a daughter in her father's household until she married, and someone who didn't marry until she was unquestionably an adult was kind of unmarriageable. The category of unmarried adult woman was pejorative in itself, rather than the word for it being particularly offensive in the sense that there could be an inoffensive synonym.
(I'm gesturing vaguely at 'the past' here -- sorry AWB. I'm sort of thinking 19th and early 20thC US and UK, but of course any such understanding wouldn't have been universal.)
implication not just of unmarried, but of unmarriageable
Exactly.
Before TLC came out with "No Scrubs," women just assumed you had to marry whoever asked.
To follow up on 237: Which means that I think it's a bit off to think of 'spinster' as offensive these days -- I don't think it ever distinguished meaningfully between nice and nasty unmarried women, it just sounded nasty because it wasn't okay for a woman to be unmarried. Thinking of it as offensive seems to me to buy into the concept that it's offensive to identify someone as an unmarried woman.
It still sounds archaic -- I'm not saying that there's any reason to use it for much -- but I don't think it should be offensive.
234 is borne out by a scan of Google Books uses of the term in the 1990's. Books of interesting phrases, academic works, biographies, a few romance novels.
I think the deal with the pejorative sense was that it was insulting to identify a woman as both adult and unmarried; she was supposed to be a daughter in her father's household until she married, and someone who didn't marry until she was unquestionably an adult was kind of unmarriageable.
I thought she was not necessarily unmarriageable in the sense of being unappealing to men - just that she was now unlikely to be married at this stage of her life. This could be either because of unmarriageability or because of misfortune, like having to take care of elderly relatives, or her fiance died and she was overcome by grief, or something.
For the first time ever, Unfogged has a comment where someone unintentionally left italics open instead of unintentionally closing them.
You're just lucky there is a double standard. Men might date women with open tags, but marriage is out.
I have honestly never heard "confirmed bachelor" used other than as a euphemism for gay. I don't think it has any other meaning.
IME, it's still used for never-married straight men to indicate that they're single by inclination, whether they're constantly dating (James Bond, George Clooney) or uninterested in significant relationships with women, but not in a gay way. Like Henry Higgins if Pickering hadn't been in the picture.
re: 236
Based on how s /avate scoring works* [and they are similar but not quite the same] my assumption is that when one or other fighter violates right of way they just won't get the point scored. No stoppage, though.
And yeah, I found the stop start nature of fencing a bit annoying.
* s /avate has no right of way, but the ref generally only stops for consistently illegal techniques, or rule infringements. The judges are expected, on the other hand, are expected to only score legal hits [irrespective of whether the ref has acted].
Pwned by Stormcrow, but with value-added examples.
245, OK, I'll add that to my list of American usages. If you described James Bond as a confirmed bachelor over here people would literally roll on the floor laughing.
I am apparently British, because it never occured to me that "confirmed bachelor" meant anything other than "yeah, totally gay".
I thought people stopped saying "confirmed bachelor" to mean non-gay men back in the 60s or 70s. Must be different in Texas.
251 is right as far as I can tell.
I'd assume it meant gay, but with enough context to make it clear that 'gay' wasn't the intent, it wouldn't sound exactly wrong to me.
I would guess that sometimes belonging to a church brings friendships, a feeling of community, a feeling of solidarity, which outweigh the hurt caused by archaic terminology used for bureaucratic rituals.
I get the first part; I just don't get the second when there are lots of other churches and congregations. I can come up with other reasons -- tradition, family history, simple convenience, a minister/priest/rabbi one likes -- I just couldn't stomach the rest of it. But then I can't stomach religion at all, so my opinion on this isn't worth much.
Google suggests that Kraab is right about American usage.
Indeed. George Clooney, confirmed bachelor
251: Me too.
I think most of the Clooney usage is winky: as in either, "Ha ha! Because he's totally *not* gay!" or, "Ha ha! Because he's totally gay!"
The 4th hit in the Google search is from the Daily Mirror.
Clooney is Schrödinger's Bachelor.
Until the closet door is opened, we won't know whether he's in there or not.
I feel I should remark on 183 to 182 again because it's about the best unintentional juxtaposition I've ever seen.
OT (any of them): The other day while handing out Medals of Freedom, Obama referred to 'Polish death camps' during WWII. There was predictable outrage in Poland, including the Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski tweeted: "It is unfortunate that this solemn ceremony was overshadowed by ignorance and incompetence". His longer (non twitter) statement amounted to saying that this has nothing to do with Obama but that whoever wrote Obama's remarks is an incompetent idiot idiot. Josh Marshall on the other hand has rendered this as:
But Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, who has very conservative politics and a habit of playing in US politics, has taken the opportunity to attack the President for his "ignorance and incompetence," in other words, playing from the GOP playbook
a) Sikorski's politics haven't been 'very conservative' for quite some time. He's now a standard issue center right European politician.
b) This is a long standing issue in Poland. When prominent foreigners or media outlets use the formulation lots of outrage follows, occasionally even making the front pages if the offender is prominent enough. So the Polish reaction is what you'd expect and as you would also expect the opposition is attacking the government for the weakness of its response and the incompetence of its foreign service.
c)The remarks really do indicate a degree of incompetence. If you're going to be honoring a famous Polish person, you want to run your remarks by somebody at State who has a clue about Poland. Either they didn't or whoever vetted the remarks was unqualified.
...you want to run your remarks by somebody at State who has a clue about Poland.
I'm not faulting the Polish reaction, but this kind of thing isn't new.
It took me quite a while to figure out why the formulation would be inappropriate to anyone, upon hearing this story.
d) the median Pole really liked G.W. Bush and his buddy Rumsfeld for dissing the Germans and the Russians and letting Poland into the missile defense clubhouse
e) the median Pole doesn't think very highly of Black people in general and Barack Obama in particular
266: Really? "Polish death camps" sure sounds like very bad diplomacy to me.
f) The median non wingnut member of the Polish elites is generally pretty well disposed to Obama and stopped being fond of Bush late in his presidency.
g) Sikorski moved from the wingnut camp to the centrist one about six or seven years ago. (At the risk of being banned, think of him going from being a Polish Wolfowitz to a Polish Gates). This has included gushing speeches about Germans and steering the improvement in Polish-Russian relations.
I get it as offensive once someone's offended, but I'd miss it without a warning -- it seems like a reasonably natural way of saying 'located in Poland'. But of course the implication of 'created by the government of Poland' is also a natural thing to hear, and a reasonable thing to be offended by, and the sort of thing a speechwriter should catch.
266: I read it as death camps located in Poland. I already had a vague idea of who was running them. Given the history of Jews vs. Poles though, the flap is protesteth too mucheth.
Outside of historical sources and people deliberately trying to provoke, you almost never hear "German death camps." It's always "Nazi death camps." I don't see how it is easy to miss.
The sentence in context really seems to stress "geographical location," but I guess those diplomat types ought to have known that it would guarantee a brouhaha. "Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself."
Inside of historical sources . . . no I can't do it.
Substantive backing to 272: I made an graph.
265: In my mind I had that one linked to Gerald Ford. But I think I was conflating it with Ford's infamous "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" debate line (which he further clarified by citing Poland among other countries).
Everybody in the news was already talking about Ford, plus Carter's was really a cock joke.
275: I am blocked from following that URL here at work due to "Nazi" but be sure you've accounted for n-grams being case-sensitive.
271 There's a bit of a difference between generalized racism and discrimination, both private and state sponsored, and extermination. However, it is certainly true that the issue of 'Polish death/concentration camps' has been deliberately blown up over the past decade and a half as a way of deflecting the domestic Polish conversation from Polish antisemitism to bad foreigners and their self-hating Polish allies (read Jews or Jewish influenced) libeling Poland. It's been very effective because pretty much all Poles find the term annoying.
Karski is an interesting case - he was absolutely hated by the Polish right for being extremely crticial of Polish antisemitism, and perhaps also for the fact that his status as a hero is linked to his efforts at revealing the genocide. The right's preferred WWII heroes tend to be right wing, or even fascist resistance figures, preferably ones who were murdered by the communists and/or kept up the armed struggle after the Red Army rolled in.
278: Did not know that. Thanks. Didn't change anything much
.
278: oho!
(Doing things more rationally doesn't particularly change the original outcome.)
278: So you can't read pages the have "nazi" in the url or just can't search for the term?
This thread has been very helpful. I did not know that Fleur and Knecht met on The Bachelorette. Yeah, I'm not a careful reader.
Ok, so boot camp. Hopefully it will produce immediate results, because that's how this works, and I will be able to stop being thankful for the existence of collar extenders. Jeez.
282: I don't know the exact rules, it both blocked the url and my doing the n-gram myself (that may have been triggered by the n-gram doing a Google book search at the same time, I'm not really that interested in teasing it out further*).
*And the person I could ask is two rows over... but not gonna do that either.
Maybe I'll paste in a scene from my Inglourious Basterds slash fiction and see if I can't get JP and LB blocked from the thread.
NAZI Content NAZI in NAZI threads NAZI doesn't NAZI get NAZI me NAZI blocked NAZI.
..so far.
The median non wingnut member of the Polish elites is generally pretty well disposed to Obama
That formulation doesn't contradict what I wrote..
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My hand is out of its stitches and swaddling! I still can't really move my fingers, but the infection seems to be nearly gone and I'm allowed to drink beer again. Woo hoo!
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Great. Once you're all healed, you can skin the cat.
287: Maybe this is just because I lived in PL during the US invasion of Iraq, but my sense then was that the median Pole absolutely did not have a positive perception of W.
Catching up on the thread, not only did I invite several of our exes to our wedding, but some of them were members of our wedding party.
9". Anybody says anything else is a liar.
Why you dirty-minded boy, I was thinking of the Equator.
Equate 'er? I ... will stop there.
You'll never see Australia that way.
not only did I invite several of our exes to our wedding
Most people go from monogamous to swinging. Kudos for bucking the trend!
OT: Is there a name for the fallacy proving impossibility by assuming of worst, or really bad, case scenario? And is Cosma's essay an example?
297 You missed the last part of the sentence
I don't know, but there was a great Marshall McLuhan moment in the thread -- ajay invoked Ken MacLeod and he appeared.
LB, you're alive! How's your "promotion" going?
I was just reading that Cosma post. I don't know enough about math or CS to know if his overall argument is correct, but it's an interesting read.
Let me try that again. Arguing that a specific hypothetical algorithm is limited by computational power because of uncontrolled growth rates of some larger set of algorithms seems dodgy. He does address this, but it's ultimately hand waving.
Not overwhelming workload yet, but lots of panic. It'll all work out all right. Presumably.
303: doesn't that sort of argue for the dodginess of the whole field of computational complexity? From what I've read a lot of the arguments boil down to a similar not-analogical-but-not-wholly-dissimilar style of reasoning.
Is this the geographical misspeak thread? Some outfit or organization is running a big ad campaign around here with billboards on the freeway, ads in the paper, etc. The slogan is "Montana, Gateway to Yellowstone". Which it sure it is...if you're driving from Canada. From Utah, not so much.
Not overwhelming workload yet, but lots of panic. It'll all work out all right. Presumably.
Aren't you only required to hold everything together for a limited amount of time until people start returning? It sounds like you're succeeding so far.
306: "Montana: A trivial portion of Yellowstone is here" makes a shitty slogan.
"Michigan, Gateway to Wisconsin"
300: ajay invoked Ken MacLeod and he appeared.
Although actually Cosma invoked him first, and ajay brought up the same MacLeod book which Cosma gushed about in a footnote (but did not otherwise invoke with regard to his argument).
I do literally have 11 unread tabs open from links in the article in addition to half-a-dozen I already scanned through.
Also, the essay itself is a lot easier to read on Cosma's blog (and footnote links and returns work better or at all).
I'm eager to see the fireworks that will result when CharleyCarp sees 309.
The Montana part of Yellowstone is in fact pretty sweet.
314: ? The parts of Montana that border Yellowstone are pretty sweet, but other than having three of the entrances, the actual small portions within the park boundaries do not really have any kind of particular identifying features beyond being part of the general terrain.
I believe Charley will beg to differ with 315.
I dunno. I was in Montana, and I went to Yellowstone, and as far as I know I never left Montana, but the parts of Yellowstone I saw were pretty sweet. I am certainly willing to concede that the preceding is not separable from Yellowstone, Montana, or the Mountain West generally being pretty sweet, but nonetheless.
Also there were giant forest fires when I visited, so I couldn't see very far.
I will fight him and win. I guess I should have said beyond being part of the generally very sweet terrain which pretty much follows from my first sentence. But I defy him (or others) to name any distinguishing feature of the part of Yellowstone in Montana (other than the gateways) which is not basically an extension of the bordering Yellowstone-in-Wyoming or non-Yellowstone-in-Montana lands.
317: If you went more than 3 or 4 miles on any of the roads you were in Wyoming.
The median non wingnut member of the Polish elites is generally pretty well disposed to Obama and stopped being fond of Bush late in his presidency.
Just out of curiosity, what about the median elite including wingnuts and non-wingnuts?
320: no idea. There was a river. It was smoky. Does that narrow it down?
Actually I'm reasonable sure we stayed in the far northwest corner because much of the rest of the park was on fire at the time.
314 et seq.: I love the northern part of the park. I'm still bummed we didn't manage to make it very far up the Mt. Washburn trail when Magpie and I were there, but what we did see was pretty amazing.
I will confess to being a nitpicking asshole. The northern part of the park is great, but it is mostly in Wyoming. One of the best places I've ever been is Beartooth Pass in Montana on the road to Cooke City and the NE Entrance to Yellowstone. But not in the park.
The most visitors to Yellowstone do come in through the Montana entrances, and I did forget that US 191 is within the park for a fair bit in Montana even though it is outside the entrance gate.
326: Most of the visitors from Utah, I think, would be going wildly out of their way to come in from Montana. So putting up the billboard in SLC doesn't make a lot of sense. I think. I'm still not clear on where things are here.
It's the part of the park actually in Montana that's best for getting away with murder due to a loophole in the constitution, if I remember correctly.
Most of the visitors from Utah, I think, would be going wildly out of their way to come in from Montana.
Not necessarily wildly, since one of the plausible entrance routes from SLC would be I-15 to US 20, which cuts through a small portion of Montana on its way into the park, but yeah, most people probably use a different route.
I'm still at the point where if it's not on I-15 I'm not certain it exists.
331: Ah, so it probably was running on the "bench" and not a typo for "beach" like I had presumed.
Sure, when I went to Yellowstone from Utah went in the south entrance after being at Teton. Entry stats in 2010 by entrance:
East (WY) North (MT) Northeast(MT) South (WY) West(MT)
468,253 699,230 229,877 765,013 1,477,832
333: Yes you did, which is why I remembered it.
3 of the 5 entrances. What do you think "gateway" means? This, maybe?
330 -- Depending on the time of year. Winter visitors go in through West.
That's a lot of entering into Yellowstone.* I assume a lot of those are park rangers who live outside the park going back and forth, though.
*Sexual euphemism? For what?
Andrew Sullivan's readers provide a pretty good illustration of why Poles dislike the formulation 'Polish death camps' so much. See this as an example The notion that Poles were equally responsible with the Germans for the extermination of the Jews is fairly common, and batshit insane. In terms of aiding and abetting, they were far less responsible than, say, the Dutch. Not because of any lack of racism or moral courage, but simply due to the nature of the German occupation of Poland. Attitudes were a different story, and a pretty large proportion of the Polish population thought that the Holocaust was a good thing, another large segment saw it as something that didn't concern them at all, and yet another large group was horrified while remaining antisemitic - there's no contradiction between being a racist and thinking that exterminating the people you're prejudiced against is a terrible thing. But in terms of action, the Polish population was overwhelmingly passive, the tens of thousands of Jews killed by Poles and the tens of thousands saved by them notwithstanding. Collaborating with the Germans was not exactly a popular action and sheltering Jews was likely to get you killed. Both the wartime attitudes and actions of Poles, and the racism of Polish society before the war and after get discussed constantly. Each of Gross' increasingly flawed books becomes a bestseller with countess prime time debates.
339: Is there a more depressing dispute than "Who is/was more responsible than me for the Holocaust, while still being less culpable than the Germans?"
(Probably, but I've lived a sheltered life.)
340: Could be the basis for a Euro-wide reality show with teams from different countries hiding and seeking. Penalties would give "sent to the showers" a whole new meaning. Meanwhile, I'll put in some more practice with the AR carbine, I'm willing to blame the whole continent without much distinction.
I nominate Austria!
329: It's the part of the park actually in Montana that's best for getting away with murder due to a loophole in the constitution, if I remember correctly.
The Idaho part is your best bet, but the Montana part a close second.
But which part of the park is most responsible for the Holocaust?
298
Is there a name for the fallacy proving impossibility by assuming of worst, or really bad, case scenario? And is Cosma's essay an example?
I don't think Cosma is claiming to have proved the problems are impossible just that we currently don't know how to solve them.
303
Let me try that again. Arguing that a specific hypothetical algorithm is limited by computational power because of uncontrolled growth rates of some larger set of algorithms seems dodgy. He does address this, but it's ultimately hand waving.
Actually there is a specific point that seems a bit dodgy. Cosma quotes the best performance guarantees as
(m+n)3/2 n2log(1/h)
but then starts citing the performance of commercial linear programming software. In general this software does not use the algorithms that have the best guaranteed performance but instead the algorithms that appear to work best in practice. The performance of these algorithms may scale in a more favorable way than the n**3.5 cited.
It doesn't really matter the problems are hopelessly intractable in any case (albeit perhaps because of difficulties in obtaining decent data than in calculating).
(Truth be told, my favorite parts of Y'stone are in Wyoming. Grand Canyon, Hayden & Lamar, ice cream parlor at OF . . . and [don't tell anyone] Boiling River. Although the parking lot for BR is in Montana, I think.)
If that were true, I would expect arguments about how a state-of-the-art central planning scheme would be inferior to the free-market. Instead, he gives arguments about how the difficulty of finding the global optimum varies with an unspecified number of degrees of freedom and (this, I think, is the most significant) an unspecified distance from said optimum. I'll try to say this more clearly in the morning, but I'm quite drunk right now.
I mean, fuck a bunch of Montanan parking lots.
I've made out in that parking lot! And BR was better in the olden days, but still better than lots of things you'd find other places.
Shearer is right in 345.
As for 346, no, actually, the theoretically-best solvers (like interior-path algorithms) really are what you find in commercial software. There was a phase in the 1980s when the algorithms with provably-not-horribly performance for convex optimization weren't practically feasible, but that's long since past.
As for Eggplant's points, I apologize for my lack of clarity. The planners need to optimize the production and allocation of goods; that number of goods is my n. The time required to approximate an optimal allocation grows as n grows, somewhat faster than cubic in n. What I'm pointing out is that for real economic planning, n would be so much larger than what we can currently do that we have no real hope of solving the problem, at least not with currently-known optimization techniques.
Accepting more approximation error does cut the computing time required, but very slowly (logarithmically). Whatever degree of error you find acceptable when solving a problem with a mere 12 million variables, you'd need to take on literally exponentially more error when doing real economic planning to break even in computing time.
As I said, this argument is vulnerable in a number of ways: there might be much more efficient algorithms for convex programming than any yet known; there might be special structure to economic planning problems which could be exploited to solving them quickly. What I don't see is how one could argue that the number of variables to be optimized over is only 12 or 13 million.
That's a lot of entering into Yellowstone.* I assume a lot of those are park rangers who live outside the park going back and forth, though.
Why? I'm not sure if staff are included in those numbers or not, but even if they are they would be a tiny portion of the total compared to visitors. I presume JP's data come ultimately from here, and although I haven't found a report on that page breaking it down quite the way he has it his numbers seem to add up to about the same total for 2010 given there.
Was trying to find some history behind the placement of the park borders so close to the state lines. The original rectangle was keyed off things like the junction of the Yellowstone and Gardner Rivers. There seems to have been some lobbying for the entire park area to be added to Montana as it was much more accessible to the settled parts of Montana and it was Montanans who worked the hardest for its creation. I would not be surprised if the boundaries were influenced by similar considerations (or then again it might have been simple coincidence).
352: Numbers I used were from here.
Was trying to find some history behind the placement of the park borders so close to the state lines.
I've always assumed it was some sort of surveying error, but upon reflection the lines are off by a great enough distance that that's probably not it.
354: Huh, interesting. For recent years those totals are slightly off compared to the official NPS numbers, which explains why that was also the case when I added up your numbers. Not sure what explains the discrepancy, since both are surely based on the park's own counts.
I'm also not sure which numbers are more likely to be accurate, but they're so close that it doesn't really matter.
A pretty detailed history of the creation of the park available here.
What I don't see is how one could argue that the number of variables to be optimized over is only 12 or 13 million.
A degree of freedom is a terrible thing to waste.
I apologize for my lack of clarity
You are far more gracious than I deserve.
Accepting more approximation error does cut the computing time required, but very slowly (logarithmically).
We already have an algorithm that provides a solution that solves this problem for some k. It seems to me that to make your claims it is necessary to show not that it is impossible to get within some distance of the optimum solution, but that it is impossible to improve on the current local minimum (I suspect that the you're greatly underestimating the number of solutions that are good enough).
360: It's a convex problem (by construction), so there are no local optima, only the global optimum.
Leaving that aside, it's true that Gosplan (or rather Gosplan + on-the-spot improvisation + corruption + ...) managed to do _something_, I'm not denying that and it would be silly to do so. I _think_ (I might be wrong) that what you're asking for is whether one couldn't use that plan as a starting point. And you could, though as written it was far too summary and would need to be filled out. Once you do so and start trying to improve on it, though, the time complexity of each step in this sort of optimization algorithm is cubic in the number of variables...
We already have an algorithm that provides a solution that solves this problem for some k.
What was "k"? I don't think I understand what you're trying to argue.
Cosma, when I was a certain fraction of the way through your post, I started to worry that the comment thread was going to have to instruct people in why they shouldn't shout "quantum computing!" and declare the problem solved. I was glad to see you had a footnote to forestall the possibility.
By "k" I, of course, meant "h". If you blur your eyes a little bit they look quite similar.
Ah. So by "local minimum" you really mean not a true minimum but just a point somewhere in the neighborhood of one.
I should really go to sleep.
No way, man. It's not even 10:30 in Alaska! The sun is still up!
365: Yes, although ...
It's a convex problem (by construction), so there are no local optima, only the global optimum.
Fair enough, though I'm going to pretend that I was referring to the more realistic problem of nonlinear optimization.
368: s/nonlinear/nonconvex/ ?
(I'm bitchy because the deadline is in two days and the manuscript is 40% too long.)
I'm willing to blame the whole continent without much distinction.
You probably need to give Sweden a pass. and the Irish Free State.
370: Ireland could have let in more refugees at an earlier stage. There is some evidence that a high up civil servant in charge of these matters had a very strong policy against admittance, presumably due to anti-Semitism.
The State itself was not officially anti-Semitic; the 1937 constitution originally had two articles on religion, giving the Catholic Church a "special position" and recognising the CoI, other Protestant denominations and the Jewish congregations. This recognition was welcomed by Jewish groups at the time.
The whole thing was deleted in the early 70s.
I'd be surprised if staff people are included in the visitation numbers.
There is a surveying error with respect to the border between Montana and Wyoming, in the park. That's why the Boiling River parking lot is in Montana, although it is south of the 45th parallel.
I assume that it's no accident at all that the Montana politicians who participated in the creation of the park made sure that the two obvious and still easiest entrance ways -- along the Madison and Yellowstone rivers -- would both be in Montana and not Wyoming.
One of the delegates to our constitutional convention (in 1972) has taken a liking to me, and summons me to lunch every now and then. He tells a story of how Montana ended up stealing the part west of the divide from Idaho, involving make gold nuggets, promises of Republican residents (unlike those Democrats in Idaho) stretched truths. I should probably crack a book.
Which book adds that the fellow who was sent east to advocate dividing the Idaho Territory by Montana miners upset with poor governance from Idaho was the chief justice of the Idaho court, and had a personal grievance against the governor of Idaho for assigning him to the eastern (less civilized) circuit. The Idaho legislature had approved a split using a boundary far to the east, but the lobbyist chief justice, a former congressman from Ohio, got his friends in Congress to move the line westward.
Just under 4m a year doesn't sound like a huge amount for what is probably the most famous national park in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Edgerton
This strikes me as one of the more poorly written articles in The Wick, but I'm not really qualified to judge literary merit. The information is all here -- I hadn't known about the John Brown connection -- with a strong implication that the gold was used to bribe Congress. The author slanders the Democratic populace pretty freely, without explicitly noting the partisan nature of the disputes. Funny. Not that they didn't deserve it, at the time.
375. An order of magnitude greater than the number for Serengeti, which must be at least as famous.
373: There is a surveying error with respect to the border between Montana and Wyoming, in the park.
Yeah, the border is a bit bumpy through the park. This map from the NPS (from when they moved the 45th parallel marker along US 89) shows one of the deviations right near Boiling River and Mammoth, as well as the much further north park boundary (although still only a couple of miles) near Gardiner (as opposed to the Gardner River, they couldn't get anything right* ...). From looking at the satellite photos, the Boiling River parking lot is barely in Montana just south of where 89 crosses the river at the bend (the feature itself is marked on the map as a bit further south in Wyoming).
*Not too surprising as the park creation was just a very few years after the Yellowstone region really got thoroughly explored and mapped by the white devils.
351
As for 346, no, actually, the theoretically-best solvers (like interior-path algorithms) really are what you find in commercial software. There was a phase in the 1980s when the algorithms with provably-not-horribly performance for convex optimization weren't practically feasible, but that's long since past.
In your Crooked Timber post you say:
A good modern commercial linear programming package can handle a problem with 12 or 13 million variables in a few minutes on a desktop machine. Let's be generous and push this down to 1 second. (Or let's hope that Moore's Law rule-of-thumb has six or eight iterations left,and wait a decade.) To handle a problem with 12 or 13 billion variables then would take about 30 billion seconds, or roughly a thousand years.
So you are assuming the n**3.5 worst case scaling is also the average case scaling seen in practice. So for example a problem with 12000 or 13000 variables would take a factor of 30,000,000,000 less time (or just a few nanoseconds). This seems unlikely to me. The simplex algorithm was notorious for having terrible (exponential) worst case performance but good performance in practice. You could not deduce the actual scaling in practice from the worst case bounds. Perhaps for current algorithms the practical scaling and the worst case scaling are in fact the same but there is no logical requirement that this be so. So at best you are being unclear by conflating worst case and practical case performance.
377: Approaches 90% of visits in the four months June-September (site I linked in 354 has visitation by month). Also from the historical numbers, passed 1M in 1948 and 2M in the mid '60s (my first visit).
Dramatic impact of WWII on long-distance travel shows up as well (in the US johnny-came-lately timeframe):
1941: 579K
1942: 185K
1943: 61K
1944: 86K
1945: 189K
1946: 807K
381 -- There's also an issue of staffing the Gardiner entrance station. Certainly no one is there at night in the winter -- so most of my Park visits while I was a student went unrecorded -- and I don't think it's manned nowadays during the day in the winter, although I think the entrance at West is. Actually, I'm not sure Gardiner is manned at night in the summer even. The numbers are probably trivial though, even counting eg the dozens of folks who went to Boiling River after that Commander Cody concert in Gardiner that time.
376: Interesting as is his involvement with the Henry Plummer lynching/Montana Vigilantes stuff. And after all of that Edgerton comes back to Akron to practice law. Probably explains Edgerton Rd. not too far from where I grew up, but I never knew the history.
Well, that went about as well as could be expected.
Great. Wash your hands well now. You should take about as long as it takes to sing "Happy Birthday" twice.
This strikes me as one of the more poorly written articles in The Wick, but I'm not really qualified to judge literary merit.
Yes, it reads as if written by somebody whose first language was not English. Interesting guy, though.
106
The solution to the NP-Hard problem mentioned above can be approximated by relaxing the assumption that everyone must be at one and only one table. Fuzzy table membership can be assigned for maximum sociability.
Exes, for example, don't need to be assigned to any table at all, and can stand for the duration of the event.
233
I have honestly never heard "confirmed bachelor" used other than as a euphemism for gay. I don't think it has any other meaning. Which is why I was surprised to see it register so high at a time when people who feel the need for such a euphemism might be thought to be dying off.
Ex recto, I guess that the phrase's use in that context would peak in the early-to-mid-20th century. In the 19th century and earlier, gender roles were so rigid and family ties were so important that even gay people got married. Gay or single lifestyles would be greatly helped by First Wave feminism, a social safety net, and a modern transportation infrastructure at the very least.
I'd be surprised if staff people are included in the visitation numbers.
I'm pretty sure they aren't. Each park sets its own protocol for counting (although they all have to do it and submit numbers monthly), but I've never heard of one that included staff. We certainly didn't at Chaco.
375. An order of magnitude greater than the number for Serengeti, which must be at least as famous.
Yes, but it's in Tanzania, which is a lot harder to get to for Americans. And the Yellowstone numbers are also less than visit the Peak District, the Lake District, the Broads, the Moors or the Dales. Obviously, the numbers aren't directly comparable given the different nature of national parks in the US and the UK, but the general point stands. Yellowstone has geysers and grizzlies, whereas the Lake District has peat bogs and sheep.
Note that Yellowstone, while certainly in the top tier of US National Parks by visitation numbers, is by no means at the very top. That position belongs to Great Smoky Mountains, with 9 million visitors a year.
Yellowstone is absolutely in the middle of absolute nowhere in terms of where people live in America. I think you could draw a circle with a 200-mile radius around the center of the park and that circle would not have a population of 4 million people. Idaho, Wyoming and Montana together are barely 3 million. If it wasn't for the Salt Lake City area that radius could be 300 miles. Somehow I think the Yorkshire Dales are easier for the average person to drop into for a visit.
How many entrances/individual visitors roughly? I have a hard time believing that anywhere close to 3 million individual people go to Yellowstone every summer (I could be wrong). I haven't been there in 20 years but I don't recall anything like the infrastructure to support those numbers. Unless I'm missing something very basic.
Unless I'm missing something very basic.
It's freakin' enormous?
Yosemite gets 4 million, apparently.
I was similarly surprised recently in Joshua Tree, which claims to receive 1.25 million visitors a year...
I guess if you count the summer season as 100 days, 3 million per summer gets you 30,000 visitors a day, which doesn't seem that impossible. Still 3,000,000 unique individuals visiting each summer seems mind boggling, and some (most?) of the 30,000/day would be there in milton at trips.
Yellowstone has geysers and grizzlies, whereas the Lake District has peat bogs and sheep.
Be the change you want to see, Ginger.
396: When I was there in 198?, the roads were solid streams of cars and every parking lot was packed.
I haven't been there in 20 years but I don't recall anything like the infrastructure to support those numbers. Unless I'm missing something very basic.
I think you must be, but I can't really figure out what it would be. Yellowstone has massive amounts of infrastructure to support its massive visitation. There are several huge hotels, eight visitor centers, and tons of other services. Most of this stuff isn't particularly new, either.
391 is correct as well (at least in general terms; I don't know the specific population numbers). As noted above, Great Smoky Mountains, which is way more accessible to the more densely populated parts of the country, gets more than twice the visitation of Yellowstone.
You can camp if you have a solid-walled camper. They want the bears to get some exercise.
Teo, what do the "visitor" numbers mean? Does someone who enters the park 40 times a year count as 40 visitors, or one?
403: Generally they refer to visits rather than visitors, so someone who visits 40 times gets counted separately each time.
I suspect the number of people who visit Yellowston 40 times a year is pretty small. For some other parks this would be a bigger issue.
What about a person on a three day trip staying just outside the park borders? Three visits, or one?
Yellowstone is mostly surrounded by other parks and national forests. Maybe there is a combined, regional count.
When I was there in 198?, the roads were solid streams of cars and every parking lot was packed.
I doubt anyone here but Carp goes there more often than I do and yeah, lots of people. We always make reservations and that's for tent camping.
What about a person on a three day trip staying just outside the park borders? Three visits, or one?
Probably one. I suspect they count each time someone pays the entrance fee, which is good for 7 days.
I doubt anyone here but Carp goes there more often than I do and yeah, lots of people. We always make reservations and that's for tent camping.
Guess I lucked out the last time I went (Labor Day weekend, '04); it wasn't mobbed by any stretch of the imagination. That's pretty late in the season to go, though, and we got really fortunate with the weather.
Yellowstone is mostly surrounded by other parks and national forests. Maybe there is a combined, regional count.
No, typically individual units do their own counts. There may be some exceptions, but I doubt they apply in this case.
I feel there is book cooking going on here.
Do the different NPs get funding based on a visitors/year metric?
414: It's one consideration in the funding formula, certainly, but money is tight these days and serious exaggerations would get major scrutiny. I still don't see why you're so skeptical about this, though.
Also, for parks like Yellowstone that charge entrance fees the numbers are likely to be much more accurate than for the ones that don't.
Okay, Halford, what would you have guessed the annual visitation numbers were at Yellowstone?
(Labor Day weekend, '04); it wasn't mobbed by any stretch of the imagination.
I suspect the school schedules up here help with that. In Cali we often started after Labor Day but here, ID, etc. they all seem to start at the end of August.
You don't want to visit late. After August, the bears that are behind in their fat-storing will eat nearly anybody.
Offhand, I'm going to say that the "visitor" government conspiracy has inflated actual attendance by more than 2/3, and that about 1 million individual people make trips to visit Yellowstone every year. Which is still an awful lot of people.
418: How many jellybeans do we get if we guess right?
421: And do you have any basis for saying that, or are you just making shit up?
Ten million visit Epcot and that sucks. Yellowstone is popular and crowded.
This suggests that the numbers are unreliable
I realize I should just let this go, since Halford is just doing his usual annoying thing where he asks a question, people answer, and he then goes on arguing as if he doesn't accept the answer but never explains why.
That is the first academic journal article that I've not had free access to. I assume the journal is super shit-tacular. Anyway, the abstract doesn't say whether they mean unreliable by undercount or overcount.
Yeah, the link in 425 looks so general as to not be particularly relevant here. I'm not denying that park visitation numbers are unreliable in general; they absolutely are. I don't see any particular reason to doubt the ones at Yellowstone, though, which I think are likely to be among the most reliable in the US.
But like I said before, I know Halford's never going to budge and I should just disengage before he drives me crazy.
I don't have academic access either. Also I have never seen a "Journal for" rather than "Journal of".
Yellowstone is very old and faithful.
I am specifically accusing your agency, Teofilio, of engaging in a fraudulent conspiracy to cook the books. Actually, I'm mostly just joking, and enjoying a bit of crankery. But it's still not clear to me what exactly counts as a "visitor" for purposes of the NPS numbers and what efforts are being made at reconciling "visitor" with "unique individual who visits a national park." Counting gate entrances seems like a pretty poor way of figuring out the latter, and there's a weird terminological shift in which "visitor" may or may not mean "individual person."
But it's still not clear to me what exactly counts as a "visitor" for purposes of the NPS numbers and what efforts are being made at reconciling "visitor" with "unique individual who visits a national park."
As far as I understand it (and this isn't really my area of expertise), these numbers aren't really counting unique visitors but unique visits, which is what the NPS actually cares about for most purposes such as assessing impacts to resources. There isn't really a way to convert from this to unique individuals, but the NPS doesn't particularly care about that. For a park like Yellowstone that is pretty isolated and which people tend to visit as a single big trip, the two are probably pretty close within a given year. For other parks, such as those in urban areas that local people may visit frequently, the number of visits would definitely be a lot higher than the number of unique visitors.
Halford, is there a reason that it matters that the visitors be unique? Beyond allowing our minds to be blown by the numbers? Obviously repeat visitors use the park's infrastructure just the same.
There's probably some research somewhere trying to find a conversion factor between visits and unique visitors. I doubt any of it is particularly accurate or useful.
In fact, repeat visitors probably use the park's infrastructure less in that they will probably wait until they get to the hotel, which is outside of the park, to take a dump in a cleaner space.
435 -- Probably not too much of a difference from the internal point of view of resource management for within the park (I don't really know enough to know). But I think when people (or at least me) are asking "how many people visit Yellowstone per year" they want to know how many unique individuals are setting off on trips to a given national park every year. So the difference between 3 million visitors per year being 3 million unique individuals and 3 million visitors being 1,000,000 unique individuals entering the park multiple times (if true) would tell you a lot about differences in tourism to national parks.
435: If you were interested in studying, say, what part of the population gets a benefit from the existence of Yellowstone, the number of unique visitors would be important. But that doesn't mean there's anything useless or fraudulent about studying the number of visits, which is obviously what you need to know to look at impacts on the park, and says something different but still interesting about how much people get out of it.
Not to slam the janitorial staff at our nation's parks. With those crowds, it must be hard to keep up.
So the difference between 3 million visitors per year being 3 million unique individuals and 3 million visitors being 1,000,000 unique individuals entering the park multiple times (if true) would tell you a lot about differences in tourism to national parks.
If you would like to do a randomized survey of park visitors to find this out feel free to try. There is a way to do this sort of thing, and people do it from time to time, but it's very difficult and expensive. I'm sure there are some instances where the difference is likely to have important effects on park management (like in the urban parks I mentioned above), in which case the NPS might be interested in doing the work, but for a park like Yellowstone it's unlikely to care.
there's a weird terminological shift in which "visitor" may or may not mean "individual person."
Nobody tell Halford about the hijinks websites get up to when reporting traffic numbers!
Seriously, though, for Yellowstone the number of visits is almost certainly very close to the number of unique visitors. How many people do you know who have gone there more than once in a single summer?
More than once in one summer on occasions separated by more than seven days!
N.B. I don't have access to that wack-ass journal either.
This survey (exclusively of non-Montanans) says that more than half of Yellowstone visitors are repeat visitors and more than half plan on returning within 2 years. Not answering the same question, but suggests that there may be a significant group that goes there more than once/year.
446: Huh, interesting. Anyway, that's the sort of research that would be needed to answer this question. The University of Montana does a lot of it, so if you dig around in their stuff you might find something that addresses the question more directly.
BTW, here's the Yellowstone counting instructions document.
Following are detailed instructions for collecting and reporting data to be entered on Form 10-157, Revised, Monthly Public Use Report by Yellowstone National Park. These instructions are effective the date of issuance and will continue in effect unless changed by amendment or by memorandum from the Socio-Economic Studies Division to the superintendent approving a requested change.Short answer: Inductive loop traffic counters at the entrance with people/vehicle tables. Overnight versus day visitors via data from campgrounds and lodgings.
The busiest entrance (West) has about 5,000 vehicles/day in July.
Service unavailable!! Stormcrow, you are clearly in on the conspiracy.
Your internet connection is for shit. It opened for me. Also, tl;dr.
Try this link with links to various reports.
Got it. Good lord . . . the person per vehicle multipliers . . . how deep does this go?
Other than double-decker buses, the persons are only one layer deep.
A 3.1 person per vehicle multiplier for the West Gate in summer!!! 3.1!! Applied automatically to every (recreational) car that goes through the gate!
Dr. Evil is constructing a series of installations which will be used to threaten to trigger the caldera*. The inflated visitor stats are being used to explain the volume of vehicular traffic.
*And hold the world ransom for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
456: Yes, about the only place in the US where that multiplier would be appropriate. Very few "one"s other than the Ted Kaczynskis of the world. A lot of "two"s for the demented old people going to throw themselves into the boiling mud pits, and then Dr. Evil's work crews the families.
458: you can't fool Halford; he lives in LA. He knows you can't fit more than two people at most in one car.
But the Montana survey information says only 34% of visitors to Yellowstone traveled with a child under 18 (it does also say only 8% traveled alone). Are we to believe that it's realistic to figure that there are so many cars with 3+adults?? Good God the horror.
460: I think it is more the case that there are so many visitors with 3 or more children.
Would it make it better if they're SUVs, Halfie?
Anyway, when I visited Yellowstone, it was in a full-sized van with 3 adults and four kids. We were pulling a pop-up trailer.
Point to the place on the doll where not having been to Yellowstone in 20 years hurt you, Halford.
Wouldn't some of the vehicles be buses? That would really raise the average if there were many.
Lots of people drive through and stay outside the park. (We stay at Chico more often than we stay in the park.) This is a bigger deal at Glacier, obviously, since the loop tourists drive is more outside the park than in.
460: Well Mr. "This be close reading" Halford, the survey you are pinning some of your misconceptions on was a more general survey of visitors to Montana and selected those who were going only to Yellowstone.
Nonresident summer visitors to Montana who indicated the only park visited was Yellowstone Park were pulled from the 2001 Nonresident Visitor Survey for this summary. 30% of summer visitors went only to Yellowstone National Park.Now there is not necessarily a vehicle occupancy/children under 18 bias in such a selection method, but it would not have counted the fucking Griswolds for instance.
And from the same source we have "Yellowstone National Park Visitors: A Seasonal Analysis" from 2009 which includes little nuggets like: Travel group size was highest in summer at 4.03. But go ahead and use your self-serving little survey from 2001 because that's what I'd expect an IP lawyer from LA to do, and I'm too old to start revising my expectations of people.
465: Reading the fucking document, Donnie Moby, buses are counted separately.
468: What part of 'tl;dr' did you miss?
469: None of it, but I'd expect someone admitting that to keep their idle speculations to themselves. And speaking of idle, where's that little pissant, teo? I'm doing his work for him here.
Who else needs insulting?
Yes, buses are counted separately -- but not for the purposes of the average you cte in 467, where "travel group size" of more than 8 (thus, almost certainly not in one car) count for 11% of the total summer visitors, resulting in the very high 4.1 person group size you cite. Thus, the average cited in the research you find is not particularly helpful for figuring out the person-per-vehicle multiplier. Of course, the table you cite also excludes Montana residents, who also presumably make up a reasonable portion of the small-group-size population.
Can I add a "you disgusting motherfucker" at the end there?
Here at beautiful Tourettes National Fuckfest, you'll learn about such aspects of our nation's glorious bounty as... counting! And... reports!
You know what's worse than an NBA Team from Boston?
Two NBA teams from Los Angeles.
How is Cleveland's team doing?
Also, I do not think people in Boston will be celebrating this particular season.
Whereas people in LA will look on this season as the one where the Clippers surpassed the Lakers once and for all.
Not actually true, though I did fear it after David Stern's lovely intervention of December. Could we turn our attention away from Yellowstone and towards killing him?
Halford wants the extended families/cousins/bookies of NBA refs to starve.
Why I thought "cousin" was not a subset of "extended family" is a question for the ages.
And speaking of idle, where's that little pissant, teo? I'm doing his work for him here.
Avoiding this thread, and intensely grateful to you for taking up my side of it so I could do that. There are times when I definitely feel like I'm too earnest and sensitive for Unfogged, and this is one of them.
I could have claimed to be doing actual work, but let's not kid ourselves here.
Halford is just doing his usual annoying thing
Ooh, comment-fight! Go teo! Much better than my passive-aggressive "at least one unfogged commenter" approach to calling people out.
It doesn't look like there are paper copies of that journal here, either.
I'd like to point out that at this stage we've had a nearly 200 comment diversion on the precise number of annual vistors to a national park. That's impressively anal, even by Unfogged standards.
It's actually a very special issue of the journal dedicated to "visitor flow monitoring and management."
I'm guessing this one is more relevant to the discussion than the one Halford linked, but I haven't really followed the discussion.
we've had a nearly 200 comment diversion
Yes, but how many unique commenters?
Every one of us is a unique and special flower.
The more I think about it -- and I've been thinking about this a lot -- the major issue isn't the (probably high) visitor per automobile metric. It's that the way in which they are counting "visits" appears to be to count each time a car enters the park as a separate visit. Thus, it seems that the NPS does count someone staying just outside the park on a three day trip to Yellowstone who drives into the park 3 times as 3 visitors. Or, more precisely, each time the car comes into the park on the three day trip, the NPS counts it in summer as about 3.1 visitors, depending on the gate.
Thus, for example, a single person on a three-day trip staying in West Yellowstone would count as up to 9.3 "visitors" for the purposes of the statistics.
Here is how an inductive loop traffic counter works. Each drive into the park is a separate "visit" multiplied by the person per vehicle multiplier.
I'm tempted to say that for the purposes of counting individual visitors to the park, these visitor stats are being juked worse than the Baltimore Police Department's Western Division.
I bet the roof of the visitor's center is covered in beer cans.
I bet the outhouses have been designed according to the principle that "shit always rolls downhill."
Most people only do two visits to Yellowstone: the day they go in and the day they go out.
Late fall may not be the best time to visit Yellowstone: too many 40 degree days.
This whole conversation was the result of someone giving a fuck when it wasn't their turn.
The problem with your generation is nobody cares enough to argue pointless shit about which they have no knowledge.
to argue pointless shit about which they have no knowledge
But that's my whole career!
I thought you were a scientologist.
485: Can we slam them together at just under c and solve any energy shortages?
Halford, no man steps into the same park twice.
487: I'd like to point out that at this stage we've had a nearly 200 comment diversion on the precise number of annual vistors to a national park. That's impressively anal, even by Unfogged standards.
Oh hai, but I wasn't going to say anything.
Anal? We blew wide open a significantly misleading set of government numbers. Citizen journalism in action. I want a motherfucking orange post title.
As long as we're talking about the Yellowstone caldera, what do you autodidacts think of Bill Bryson's scholarship?
We've been listening to A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is spectacularly interesting (and in which I first learned about the caldera). I'm sure there must be things he gets wrong or emphasizes the wrong parts of, but how does he do overall? Are there things he gets particularly wrong or right that you know of?
We are all going to die in a rain of heated ash. He's right about that.
This list of errata makes it look like he's pretty bad at math, but otherwise doesn't seem to have anything too horrible.
505: Not so fast on the horizons there, chum. You may have been misled, but the direction from the NPS is, The applicable rule is that one entrance per individual per day is reportable*. I did find a report on economic impact which used a survey in addition to the "visit" data and came up with a factor of about 2.5 for total entries into the park so divide by that factor to get unique visitor trips to the park area.
*If Yellowstone is erring it would be in double counting vehicles leaving the park and returning in the same day. Given Yellowstone's layout and geography this is probably not a large number--from the survey mentioned above it appeared that about 70,000 extra visits may have been attributed in a year to people on day trips going in more than once.
492: Thus, it seems that the NPS does count someone staying just outside the park on a three day trip to Yellowstone who drives into the park 3 times as 3 visitors.
Shorter 505: Yes, per their procedures.
505.*: I almost hesitate to report this (but do so in the interests of openness), but my wife most likely caused a true double counting error* ** 28 years ago when she drove up from Teton into the South Entrance and then out the West past Hegben Lake to see Quake Lake and then retraced her path back.
*Yes she would have been counted as 2.5 & 2.4 (September) on each entry but that does not constitute an "error" since the vehicle occupancy multipliers are presumably based on statistical sampling during the relevant time periods and included singleton drivers.
**Per the official NPS guidelines they should try to correct for this type of thing and maybe they do, but if so it is not reflected in the counting document.
509 leads me to recall that we were actually supposed to report entries by visitors on subsequent days as well as the initial entrance when they paid the fee, but we didn't do so very consistently. So, yeah. Much of what I said above turns out to be wrong per JP's digging through the actual documents, but like I said earlier, this isn't really my area of expertise.
I'm still pissed at Halford, though.
514: When someone from California starts to piss you off regarding the spending of tax dollars, you can say, "Wait. You're from California? Your state's tax system is really stupid." And then you don't have to listen to them anymore.
I'm still afraid of Super Volcano.
Halford's a poopyhead. Discuss.
I'm still afraid of Super Volcano.
I'm more afraid of regular volcanoes, which are a more immediate risk to me personally.
Stop. Drop. Roll. That is all you need to renember for volcano safety.
I'm not actually very afraid of them.
520: They might fuck up your flights. That seems kind of annoying.
Sometimes they give you an unexpected vacation in Paris.
God, this is fucking wonderful. I can't remember ever emerging so completely victorious in a blog fight with my foes so utterly vanquished. Note that the 2.5 multiplier that Stormcrow now hides behind in admitting that the "visitor" stats don't really mean "visitors" gets you almost the same reduction as I guesstimated (and took flak for) when Teo asked me how many visitors I thought really came into Yellowstone each summer. Time to drink a glass of expensive wine, have sex with my beautiful girlfriend in my well appointed home, and count my money. Maybe I'll even give some to charity, because I am not only successful, but a wonderful humanitarian.
(No one mention today's developments in the oogle ooks case.)
I can't be bothered to read this thread, but I will say that every park I've studied -- only four of them, admittedly -- counts visitors not by totaling unique guests but the number of people who come through the gates. That's put poorly, but I hope it's clear what I mean: if one person enters and exits the park twice in a single day, the park will count that person as two visitors. The reason for this is that the parks -- again, the ones I've studied -- don't actually care about how many unique visitors they have in a given year; they care about how much use the park is getting. And trying to keep track of unique visitors, which parks sometimes try to do, is hugely complicated and therefore expensive.
Well, that was a terrible muddle, as usual, but I hope my meaning was at least somewhat clear. Regardless, if I've accidentally taken Halford's side, I retract everything I've said, because he probably thinks Rondo didn't get fouled.
Regardless, if I've accidentally taken Halford's side, I retract everything I've said, because he probably thinks Rondo didn't get fouled.
I don't actually know the rules of basketball, but the foul-calling late in the game seemed completely bullshit.
524:Sure. Like when in 403 teo responded to your initial question with, "Generally they refer to visits rather than visitors, so someone who visits 40 times gets counted separately each time." And yes, he did then speculate incorrectly on the visitor fee versus entering thing in 410.
And I sure ain't hiding; I've used "visits" throughout (admittedly not understanding precisely what they were counting).
But yes, it appears that a million or so unique individuals visit Yellowstone each year.
Also, when boundaries are visible from space (in this case the western border of Yellowstone).
Most of my visits to Yellowstone have not been recorded. By a fairly long shot, I would think.
Staying in West and going into the Park 3 separate days might work for someone who just wants to fish in the Madison River, I guess, but those are pretty hard days if they want to see the Park attractions. Driving in Yellowstone is like driving in Southern California: you might get lucky, but the more likely scenario is that it will be awful. Summer anyway. Winter visitors are going to be staying in West and going into the Park each day.
We're hoping to get there later this month, during our homeless period. Much of the time we'll be living in Glacier, but if we can get my son's orientation moved to the late June session (instead of mid-July) we'll hang out in Yellowstone while he gets oriented. If it stays mid July, we'll be stuck at our new house unpacking boxes, and he'll go down there by himself. In which case, we'll go in August to drop him off, and hit the Park for a couple of days then.
There was a recent article on the volcano -- some scientists are saying that what has been thought of as a single huge event was actually two events, one medium small and the other almost huge, fairly close in time.
