How to pronounce magic words...

A hollow voice says "Plugh".

If you're a fan of the famous computer game, "Adventure," in which you can spend hours exploring a cave full of treasure and peril while haunted by sepulchral voices, the above will sound familiar and perhaps take you back a few years.

If not, you can find out more at the links below.

Plugh is a magic word used in several text adventure games, including:

• Adventure (the original)
  
• Radio Shack's Haunted House (for the TRS-80)
  
• Pyramid 2000 (another TRS-80 game that was basically a clone of Adventure but took place amongst the pyramids of Egypt)
  
• Raaka-Tu (yet another TRS-80 adventure game)
  
• Bedlam (and even yet another TRS-80 adventure game - also available on the TRS-80 Color Computer)
  

Somehow, however, plugh never quite retained the fame it deserved. Instead, it fell into the shadows of another more famous magic word: xyzzy.

 

Oh, and the origin of "plugh" is tackled. Some claim it means "plughole" truncated to five characters (why?) but the webmaster adds: "I never really did know how to pronounce the word, plugh, so if you happen to know, please tell me!"

He adds:

Someone recently posted an old usenet article written by Don Woods as follows:

From: Don Woods

Date: 1997/02/27

Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction

Subject: Re: XYZZY

 

Alas, Crowther was responsible for XYZZY and PLUGH. I

think I remember him saying that he'd generated them at

random, but I don't remember how (or even if) he pronounced

them.

 

For my part, I say "zizzy" and "ploog". I'm actually rather

emphatic about the latter, since it's supposed to be said in a

hollow voice. I've heard some people pronounce it "plug", "pluh",

or even "pluff", and when I imagine the hollow voice trying to say

those I keep thinking the poor voice is going to break down

laughing... (A hollow laugh, naturally. :-)

 

On the other hand, PLOVER was my addition, and since it's

keyed to the name of the bird ("an emerald the size of a

plover's egg!") it ought to be pronounced like the bird. But --

aha! -- being ignorant on the topic, I always thought the bird's

name was pronounced ploh-ver. It wasn't until I saw the

discussion here that I thought to look up the word, and found

that both pluh-ver and ploh-ver are accepted, but pluh-ver is

apparently preferred. Oh well. But if you pronounce it pluh-ver,

don't blame me if the magic doesn't work!

 

-- Don.

 

The web site creator adds: "Many years ago, my cousin and I were so into these games (especially Adventure) that we wrote a game language and several adventures that used this language."

You can play these games on-line at:

http://www.skyrush.com/explore/

 

Related links:

• The Colossal Cave Adventure Page
  
• Plugh's Home Page
  
• XYZZY
  
• RetroComputing TRS-80
  

Testing Word for HTML creation

Till today, despite my occasional deep sighs over ScribeFire, I used it in preference to other "quick-blog" systems like Google Notes or Microsoft Live! - but today, I've resolved to overcome my deep suspicions of another way - Word itself.

Word has been urging me to do this, by offering me "new blog post" every time I open a new file. So, instead of ignoring it, I resolved to try it out.

Day One

All I need to do today, is create a short blog entry (this is it!) and link to another web site. So I've picked The Guardian's story about " too much bling " as my link.

 

Too much bling costs suspected drug dealer £650,000 in assets

• Guardian, Wednesday February 6 2008
  
• Martin Wainwright
  

A suspected drugs trafficker who claimed that an ice cream van and other small businesses had earned him three homes and a fleet of luxury cars has become one of the biggest victims of criminal assets recovery law. A painstaking audit of Andrew Pickering's accounts by police in Middlesbrough and the Asset Recoveries Agency convinced a judge that the property, along with (...)

(...) fillip for the force's newly launched tip-off operation, Too Much Bling? Give Us A Ring. Neighbours are being encouraged to use anonymous (...)

<img src="http://is0215.www.is.121d8.com/pics/b.gif" align="left" />

 

I've cut that from the Guardian's own web site. We'll see if it works. And finally, let's include a link to a picture from the same site:

 

http://is0215.www.is.121d8.com/pics/b.gif

I am SO tired of Scribefire!

Three months ago, I made a not about Adobe on VeRO page for UK.

Since then, every time I try to blog something I find the Vero stuff at the top. So I'm posting it, in the hope it will bloody vanish at last!

Bet it doesn't... here is the note:


eBay UK: Help: VeRO Programme: VeRO Participants

List of VeRO participants' About Me Pages

The list below with examples of About Me pages have been prepared by copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property rights owners that report through the VeRO Programme. We hope the information provided will assist you in trading safely on eBay. We encourage you to directly contact the rights owners if you have any further questions regarding their products or policies.

* ACD Systems Ltd.
* Adobe
* Adobe Systems UK Ltd.
* Ahead Software

What VeRO is:
eBay UK: Help: VeRO Programme

eBay has created the Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) Programme so rights owners can report listings that infringe their rights. Any person or company who holds intellectual property rights (such as a copyright, trademark or patent) which may be infringed by listings or items sold on eBay is encouraged to participate in the VeRO Programme.

pretty lady?

this is a test...





met-art_vol_67_0.jpg (JPEG Image, 683x1024 pixels) - Scaled (56%)

Redmond hijacks the U3 flash memory standard?

Here's a left-field take on the joint announcement from Microsoft and Sandisk today: Guy Kewney's comment says:

Despite what many have assumed, the new Sandisk-Microsoft flash platform isn't about data storage for mobile users. It's more about making digital rights management and security for Vista computer users more completely under Redmond's control.

Technorati Tags: Sandisk, Microsoft, Flash, U3, U3 Launchpad, DRM, Fairplay, mobile

Blair: not just the shame of ID cards...

Wendy Grossman doesn't seem too sorry to see Blair go - judging by this week's net.wars column.



She writes:

So, he's gone, or almost. Ten years is a long time for anyone to remain in power. Blair hasn't quite made it as long as Margaret Thatcher did, but by virtue of the UK's different ways in electing the people who fill its top office it's longer than either Reagan or Bush II. There are children who don't remember what it was like to have the Conservatives in power.

.



Technorati Tags: Tony Blair, Blair, Bliar, Wendy Grossman, net.wars, ID cards, no2id, New Labour

My archive copy of "global warming on Mars?"

This from RealClimate
» Global warming on Mars?

Global warming on Mars? Filed under: * Climate Science * Sun-earth connections * Climate modelling * FAQ — group @ 11:21 am - (fr flag) Guest contribution by Steinn Sigurdsson. Recently, there have been some suggestions that "global warming" has been observed on Mars (e.g. here). These are based on observations of regional change around the South Polar Cap, but seem to have been extended into a "global" change, and used by some to infer an external common mechanism for global warming on Earth and Mars (e.g. here and here). But this is incorrect reasoning and based on faulty understanding of the data. A couple of basic issues first : the Martian year is about 2 Earth years (687 days). Currently it is late winter in Mars's northern hemisphere, so late summer in the southern hemisphere. Martian eccentricity is about 0.1 - over 5 times larger than Earth's, so the insolation (INcoming SOLar radiATION) variation over the orbit is substantial, and contributes significantly more to seasonality than on the Earth, although Mars's obliquity (the angle of its spin axis to the orbital plane) still dominates the seasons. The alignment of obliquity and eccentricity due to precession is a much stronger effect than for the Earth, leading to "great" summers and winters on time scales of tens of thousands of years (the precessional period is 170,000 years). Since Mars has no oceans and a thin atmosphere, the thermal inertia is low, and Martian climate is easily perturbed by external influences, including solar variations. However, solar irradiance is now well measured by satellite and has been declining slightly over the last few years as it moves towards a solar minimum. So what is causing Martian climate change now? Mars has a relatively well studied climate, going back to measurements made by Viking, and continued with the current series of orbiters, such as the Mars Global Surveyor. Complementing the measurements, NASA has a Mars General Circulation Model (GCM) based at NASA Ames. (NB. There is a good "general reader" review of modeling the Martian atmosphere by Stephen R Lewis in Astronomy and Geophysics, volume 44 issue 4. pages 6-14.) Globally, the mean temperature of the Martian atmosphere is particularly sensitive to the strength and duration of hemispheric dust storms, (see for example here and here). Large scale dust storms change the atmospheric opacity and convection; as always when comparing mean temperatures, the altitude at which the measurement is made matters, but to the extent it is sensible to speak of a mean temperature for Mars, the evidence is for significant cooling from the 1970's, when Viking made measurements, compared to current temperatures. However, this is essentially due to large scale dust storms that were common back then, compared to a lower level of storminess now. The mean temperature on Mars, averaged over the Martian year can change by many degrees from year to year, depending on how active large scale dust storms are. In 2001, Malin et al published a short article in Science (subscription required) discussing MGS data showing a rapid shrinkage of the South Polar Cap. Recently, the MGS team had a press release discussing more recent data showing the trend had continued. MGS 2001 press release MGS 2005 press release. The shrinkage of the Martian South Polar Cap is almost certainly a regional climate change, and is not any indication of global warming trends in the Martian atmosphere. Colaprete et al in Nature 2005 (subscription required) showed, using the Mars GCM, that the south polar climate is unstable due to the peculiar topography near the pole, and the current configuration is on the instability border; we therefore expect to see rapid changes in ice cover as the regional climate transits between the unstable states. Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing. There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth...