Latest from Egypt

http://www.juancole.com/2012/11/egypt-constitutional-crisis-morsi-to-meet-judges-as-weekend-clashes-leave-two-dead-hundreds-wounded.html

Do I have this right? After Mubarak was forced to resign, there was an essentially democratic election, though the candidates that did best were the current president, Morsi, and the previous prime minister under Mubarak.

Morsi won, and everyone in the west hoped that a government not dominated by the military would be a good thing, although people in the west didn't really want an explicitly Islamic candidate from the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now Morsi passed a bunch of laws that look like consolidating power and (probably) suppressing any dissent, and mass protests from everyone else broke out, leading to some deaths.

And the best we can hope for is that Morsi backs down and lets things drift along non-dictatorily, and we desperately hope it doesn't degenerate into another dictatorship, a putsch by the military factions, or slide into civil war. Is that an accurate (but extremely simplified) summary?

X-dar

A discussion came up at pizza last week. Would you expect X-dar to mean "telling you which direction X is in", "telling you whether something is X or not" or "either, depending what X is"?

Come to think of it, "is there" and "where" are basically the same thing for actual radar; it's only in portmanteaux with a more specific meaning that there's a difference.

How I count lengths

I find swimming 25m lengths rather than 91m lengths actually quite nice because I can vary my speed for a length without getting exhausted a 1/4 of the way along :)

But it's somewhat harder to count how many you've done because there's a lot more of them :)

Currently my best effort at not losing track is:

1. Count in pairs, naming even lengths only (since you can see which end of the pool you're at).
2. Don't try to remember the number, go from "done 24" at the exact moment when you turn round, to "done 24, coming up to 26" on the out length, and "coming up to 26" on the return length.
3. Repeat several times, so the number is (hopefully) stored in auditory memory.
4. Never anticipate. If you count number, I find myself a few strokes short of the end saying "that's about 26". But once that number is in my head, I forget if that's the number I've done or the number I'm coming up to.
5. At most once, when I'm at least half way to my target, I can reset and count from zero. Counting smaller numbers is definitely easier, but I don't want to do that more than once or I'll get muddled with previous counts.