Very interesting things and a quiz.

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The Best Argument to Eliminate the Tenure System comes from Atlantic University, Florida, where Professor James Tracy has asserted that the Sandy Hook shootings in Connecticut either did not happen or were staged. Asking if the deaths, if they happened, were part of a training session, he further asks “Was this to a certain degree constructed? … Was this a drill?” Read the story of the crackpot professor here.

Rush Limbaugh’s latest accomplishment:

The StopRush Project has announced that over 2,200 sponsors have pulled ads from Limbaugh’s show, via documented messages/statements. Many other sponsors have left his show quietly, bringing the actual amount of sponsors who have left, to a higher, unknown total.

The Governor of Massachusetts will have to appoint someone to replace John Kerry as Senator from the Bay State if he is in fact appointed to the position of Secretary of State. Did you know that Barney Frank is interested in that job? That would be so cool.

I write a monthly post on birds, usually about some scientific thing like evolution, at the blog site 10,000 Birds. A while back, that site was attacked by internet attackers and they had to remove a lot of functionality for a while, then rebuild the site to new specs. That herculean task is now over, and the site is redesigned and downright crispy. Go visit 10,000 Birds!

Today’s quiz: Which key on your keyboard is the “house” key?

Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:

In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle or Paperback
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6 thoughts on “Very interesting things and a quiz.

  1. The F and J keys are sometimes called “home” keys, because if you are a touch typist on a QWERTY keyboard, those are the default locations for your left and right (respectively) index fingers. Typically there will be some raised feature (dot or bar) on these keys so that you can find them without looking at the keyboard. But I presume that’s not what you mean. Likewise the one explicitly labeled “home”, the upper middle of a group of six (center of a group of nine on my Mac keyboard, which also has F13-F15 in that group) between the QWERTY portion of the keyboard and the numeric keypad and above the arrow keys for moving the cursor.

    The key John describes above is usually IME called the Windows key. My Linux box (a Dell) keyboard has two of them: one in the location he describes and the other in the corresponding location to the right of the space bar. Some Linux distros may have a use for that key, but I haven’t found one (then again, apart from the X windows system I generally don’t use GUIs on *nix boxes).

    I haven’t actually heard anything on a computer keyboard called the “house” key, at least in English. Perhaps that’s what you get by translating the “home” key to some other language and then back to English.

  2. Go look at the shift key. On many computer keyboards it has a little picture of a house on it. Or, at least, that is what Huxley sees when he looks at the keyboard!

  3. Oh, you mean that fat upward arrow on my Dell keyboard? (My Mac keyboard does not have that.) OK, I can see why someone Huxley’s age might think that’s a house. But then, I’m old enough to know firsthand why the shift key is called that: back in the days of typewriters, it literally shifted the mechanism upward so that the symbols on the lower half of the things that struck the ribbon–which is where the upper case letters and miscellaneous punctuation symbols were–would hit the ribbon, rather than the upper half, where the lower case letters and numbers were. So you have the fat upward arrow to remind you that you are shifting that big virtual mechanism upward.

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