the owl and the olive tree

I'm having a writing evening, but before I head out, I'm going to chuck a salmon fillet in the sous vide machine with some seasonings. Help me decide which seasonings!

It will be served with rice, with a green vegetable on the side.

[Poll #1716277]

Starting assumptions: werewolves are humans who assume wolf shape either at will or when provoked by a stimulus (such as the full moon). That nature is contagious, usually spread by bite.

(That is: if your werewolves don't really turn into wolves, or spread via some mechanism that's not contagious, this question is irrelevant.)

Has anyone read any werewolf stories where the contagion-via-bite is true even if they bite something other than a human? That is, where a werewolf who bites a horse might create a horsewolf that shifts into a wolf at the full moon, or where a werewolf that bites a deer creates a deerwolf, or etc.?

Alternately, any stories where there's an explicit explanation for why that doesn't happen (as opposed to just assuming from the start that the only species susceptible to the contagion is humans)?

EDIT: Of course, as deer and horses presumably can't carry silver weapons or whatever else one does to avoid werewolves if one is a human, this might result in there being a ton of horsewolves and deerwolves and whatever, any animal large enough to survive a werewolf bite, roaming around. Which would make an interesting story, I think: a world in which any animal might theoretically turn into a contagious wolf monster by night, in which humans survive in isolated enclaves with rigorously-protected livestock...

...sort of like in JRPGs, in fact, where dangerous beasts lurk to destroy you as soon as you leave town.

I have a lot of people on my friendslist who like math and appreciate the beauty of mathematics. I would like to appreciate the beauty of math too! This is a gradual change for me, because through high school I haaaaaaaaaated math, and I was positively gleeful when I got to college because my major and minor of choice required no math classes whatsoever. (I could fulfill that part of my general education requirements with either math or science GEs, and so I went with biology, mostly. Biology and paleontology.)

Anyway.

Here's my background in math, in case it helps. (I get long-winded.) The reason I haaaaaaaated math was that I was no good at arithmetic. (I can hear you all saying, as has been said to me before, 'but arithmetic isn't all there is to math!' I know. Bear with me.) This started all the way back in, like, first grade, and it started because while I have an excellent memory, I am bad at memorization. (They're not the same skill at all, in my opinion.) I remember, distinctly, being tested to find out what math group I should be in toward the beginning of first grade, and being asked 2+3, and then being penalized for counting on my fingers, because I should have had it memorized. I remember, a year later, being so bad at timed multiplication tests that they actually tested me to find out if I had a learning disability. (I didn't; I turned out to be gifted, with no learning disability in math and in fact a very good grasp of the theory behind multiplication and etc. I was just not good at memorizing multiplication tables.) That sort of set the tone for everything: I wasn't much good at memorizing multiplication tables, and I wasn't meticulous enough, and so even though I had no problem with the concepts, I struggled a lot with the arithmetic.

The problem is that if you're not so good at arithmetic, you'll have trouble in pre-algebra; if you're not so good at pre-algebra, you'll have trouble in algebra; and if you're not so good in algebra, you'll have trouble with... everything. By the time we were allowed to use calculators in Algebra II, it was too late: my association with math classes was that they were the classes in which I could totally understand the material and study for the test and still get not-so-good grades because I made arithmetical errors. And that's probably fair, because you actually do need to be able to calculate as well as understand the material, but it put me off the whole topic.

I actually got As in math in high school, partly because yay for graphic calculators, and I did trigonometry (I actually rather liked geometry and trig) and calculus, but I didn't enjoy it: because I had associations that math was the classes where I'd get poor grades without knowing why or how to fix it, they were the classes I liked the least and feared the most, even though by this point I did reliably well at them, and I was relieved to be done with the whole topic when I got to college.

However.

Reading the posts of mathy people on my flist, and having mathy friends in my discipline (being a technical writer means I spend time around lots of mathy types), makes it clear to me that I Missed Something in my desperate attempt to flee arithmetic and its descendants.

So. If you were to recommend a course of math study to an adult who still loathes arithmetic but wants to learn more about the rest of mathematics, what would you recommend? Any particular books? Where would you start?

I would love to learn more.

(Feel free to link your mathy friends to this post, if you think they might have ideas. although not if you think they will mock my lack of arithmetical prowess, because then I will a) ask how their medieval Welsh is these days, and b) bite their faces. ahem.)

This is mostly out of curiosity, but I do have a reason for asking....

Is there a difference in the amount of money that an author gets from a sale of a Kindle ebook vs. a paperback, and if so, which pays more? (I know that authors make more money on hardcovers, but the book in question is not available in hardcover.) Or is it a case-by-case thing?

(I'm asking specifically about the Kindle because that's the ereader I have. I know that there can be a somewhat sizeable difference between ebooks bought for the Kindle via Amazon and ebooks bought from other vendors, but for the sake of this question I'm just interested in the Amazon Kindle store.)

(Also, I'm going to be buying the book from Amazon either way, so no need to explain to me why I ought to support local brick-and-mortars. :) )

I have two medium-sized zucchini (ie, big enough to stuff, not so big they're unpleasantly woody to eat) in the fridge that need eating. I need something to feed the book group people tonight. The boy doesn't care for zucchini. Therefore, obvious answer: feed zucchini to book group. Simple!

The question is: how?

Poll time!

[Poll #1484528]

(Since it's potluck, none of the options have to be the main course; hence, the variety from main-course-like to warm-salad-y. You will note that all the options are vegetarian, as food for book group is always vegetarian. You will also notice some ingredients turning up over and over. This is because I'm not going shopping for this, and those are what I have on hand. But if you have any suggestions, you can suggest them, especially if they are permutations of above and/or use fairly basic pantry staples.)

So my shiny new laptop is very shiny and works beautifully, except for one thing -- it gets weird about the Internet sometimes.

There are three symptoms:

1. Not infrequently -- once or twice an evening, usually -- it drops the connection for some reason. This means that everything that requires the Internet (Firefox, AIM, Final Fantasy XI, etc), plus everything that require the local network (mapped drives, remote desktop, etc) all die at once. This can be fixed pretty quickly by repairing the connection, but it's annoying.
2. Also not infrequently (at least once and sometimes many times per evening), programs that involve streaming a lot of information over the Internet/network (primarily Final Fantasy XI and remote access to my desktop) will time out. No other Internet/network services are affected. This usually fixes itself between two and five minutes, allowing me to reconnect, without input from me, but is also annoying.
3. Sometimes, usually when coming out of hibernation or suspend, or more rarely while I'm actively using the computer, the connection will switch from 'local and Internet' to 'local access only.' This means that access over the local network is fine, but the Internet at large isn't available. Nothing seems to fix this besides rebooting my laptop, at which point it's fine.

Specs: It's a Dell laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium. The boy also has a Dell laptop (slightly different specs) with Windows Vista Home Premium, and he doesn't have these issues -- once in a while his connection drops, but not as often as mine, and the lag/timeout doesn't happen for him at all.

I have already disabled auto-tuning, which helped but not enough. I did the Microsoft Network Connectivity Testing thing, and it says that everything's working fine except Universal Plug and Play, which, I don't know whether that would be causing these symptoms or how to fix it if so. Otherwise, I'm puzzled, since the boy's laptop with very similar specs works just fine. I can't find anything in Event Log about it, either, although I suppose I might be looking for the wrong thing.

Anyone have any ideas what could be causing this kind of problem? Or an idea for a diagnostic I could use to figure it out? (It happens often enough that I could easily run a diagnostic until the problem appears, if that would help; I just don't know what to run.) It's really super annoying.

(Anyone who gives a response such as "Go back to XP" or "Switch to Linux" or "Switch to Mac" or whatever -- which are designed to make you feel superior rather than to help me -- will be roundly mocked and then soundly ignored.)

The boy and I recently got a shiny new USB hard drive for purposes of backing up our fileserver computer. Hurrah! (I had already been backing up vital documents to an offsite location, but that wasn't really feasible for things like 100 GB of mp3 files.)

So I'm looking for an automated backup solution that will sync the fileserver hard drive to the backup hard drive on a regular basis -- nightly seems about right. Automated because if I have to do it manually it's going to happen less frequently than would be ideal. Nightly so that it can happen while we're in bed and not clobber the network. (The fileserver computer remains on all the time, so that's not an issue.) Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there a tool in Windows XP that I can use to set this up?

Free is great. Cheap is fine, if a little money will net me a vastly better tool. Pricey is probably more than I need.

Any ideas?

I am searching for books on India -- history, religion, mythology, culture. General overviews would be great to start, since my background is woefully inadequate, but if you have any more specific books that you really love, I will not turn them down. (I realize that India is a big country with a long history, and I'm not being very specific, and that's mostly because I, er, don't know enough yet to be specific.)

I am looking primarily for nonfiction for these purposes, though if you have any great fiction to recommend, I will, again, not say no.

Books by Indian or Indian American authors are particularly desirable, but good books by non-Indians will work too.

Feel free to pass the request on.

Thanks!

I like wearing long skirts, especially around the house. Indeed, I'm making a few skirts for summer (one black, one dark green). However, most skirts don't have pockets -- and I'm not a good enough seamstress at this point to add pockets to a pattern that doesn't include them.

Plus, many women's pants patterns also don't have pockets, or they have pockets that are so small to be unusable. And most of my shirts don't have pockets either.

This isn't really a problem most of the time; it's why I carry a purse or a bag. But often, when I'm cleaning the house, I want to listen to my iPod -- or when I'm going for a walk, I want to bring my phone and my keys but not lug a bag with me. This is a problem when one is in a pocketless state, since there's noplace to put the iPod. Indeed, sometimes when housecleaning I am forced to resort to sticking my iPod through my bra strap, which is precarious and kind of uncomfortable (and unattractive, but I don't care about that if what I'm doing is scrubbing the kitchen floor).

Does anyone have an idea for how I can carry an iPod or phone-and-keys combo without pockets? I'm not going to resort to a *cringe* fanny-pack arrangement, because I am not fond of the way they look or the way they feel. My best idea so far is to copy medieval folk and make some kind of small pouch that can be hung at my hip (medieval clothes did not have internal pockets), but I was wondering if anyone had other ideas.