To turn inside out or outward. This word was used in a NYT article describing a worm which burrows by “everting” its mouth into a kind of big drill bit.

Branch of zoology that studies the behavior of animals in their natural habitats.

Having no force; invalid; or, of little importance. The word Bob should have known but didn’t as the antonym for effectual on the GREs (guessed and got it right anyway though).

Expressing a phrase or sentence in a single word, as is the case in the aboriginal languages of America.

Producing decreases in sports performance. Cf. ergogenic, producing increases in performance.

Threatening; menacing.

gG came to live with us on Valentine’s Day.

A type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct. For example, in the discolorations of a burnt tortilla one sees the face of Jesus Christ. Or one sees the image of Mother Theresa or Ronald Reagan in a cinnamon bun or the face of a man in the moon.

From the Skeptic’s Dictionary. Original post at Language Hat.

This phenomenon is discussed in Atran’s “In Gods We Trust”.

I put up on my web page what I am listening to at the moment. This article tells how I do that.

I listen to music through the Squeezebox, a fabulous device made by SlimDevices that plays MP3s you have on your computer through your stereo system. “SlimServer” is the server that runs on whatever computer you have handy, that you talk to through a web interface, and feeds the music wirelessly to the Squeezebox. SlimServer can also report its current status, including the current song being played, in XML format, which turns out to be useful, via the URL:

http://slimserver:9000/xml/status.html

Using wget or lwp-request, I grab this data and then process it through XSLT to get a simple string of the form SONG by ARTIST from ALBUM:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- slim-putsong.xsl:
transform slimserver XML status output into SONG by ARTIST from ALBUM -->

<xsl:transform
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:sl="http://www.slimdevices.com/slimserver/xml"
version="1.0"
>

<xsl:output method="html" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>

<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:for-each select="sl:status/sl:player_status/sl:current_song/sl:song">
<b><xsl:value-of select="sl:title"/></b> by
<b><xsl:value-of select="sl:artist"/></b> from
<b><xsl:value-of select="sl:album"/></b>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:transform>

With Slimserver 6.x, the XML format was changed. The “sl:song” portion of the for-each statement above needs to be removed.

You can apply this XSLT through a tool such as xsltproc.

I wrote a little shell script which grabs the URL, transforms it, and FTPs it to my server:

#!/bin/sh

# shell script to create HTML of current song playing on Squeezebox,
# and ftp'ing a file containing that information to bob's blog.

wget --quiet --output-document=-  http://localhost:9000/xml/status.xml | \
xsltproc --novalid slim-putsong.xsl - > slim-putsong.html

ftp -i -n my.host.name <<EOF
user user password
cd /some/directory/
put slim-putsong.html
bye
EOF

To prevent FTP’ing an unchanged file, precede the ftp line with

diff slim-putsong.html prev-slim-putsong.html > /dev/null ||

Run this script from cron however often you want.

All that remains is to include the HTML file into the web page you want the info to appear on, with something like

<? include 'slim-putsong.html'; ?>

Contemplating one’s navel as an aid to meditation. Also “omphalopsychitism”, mystical contemplation of the navel as a way of inducing hypnotic reverie.