Dvandom

There's an awkwardly ill-fitting subsection of "steampunk" that abuses the genre definition more badly than most of the things under that umbrella, and that's stories that are primarily fantasy (usually Low Fantasy, but sometimes High Fantasy) with the addition of steam power and gunpowder alongside magic. Stuff like the settings for the Mage Knight and Warmachine miniatures games, or even the Harrowing of the Shire in which Saruman brings heavy industry to Middle Earth. Stories like Full Metal Alchemist at least have the pseudo-victorian trappings that let them blend in with steampunk, but there's enough stuff out there that's "D&D with steam engines" that I'm surprise it hasn't acquired a label other than "steampunk".

Does anyone know of a term already in use somewhere that I have been unable to find it? "Steam & Sorcery" seems reasonable, but as it's also the title of a novel that tends to chaff the googling.

So, Halloween candy clearance time of year. I picked up some Necco brand peanut butter taffy kisses, and some candy corn flavored taffy. For dietary reasons, it's going to be a while before I finish either bag off, but I don't want to be throwing out rock-hard taffy at the end of the month either.

How can I store taffy like that and keep it soft, once the bag has been opened? Damp towel in a sealed container with it? Or is "setting" inevitable once it's exposed to air?

Whenever I make jello (or Jell-O (TM)) from package, it never sets very firmly, especially compared to the Jell-O cups. Granted, the industrially-created product is going to have access to processes unavailable in my kitchen, but is there any change I can make in order to get less-loose jello? For instance, should I add less water? More water? Lower the temperature of my fridge, or even put it in the freezer for a while? Stir the full two minutes even if it dissolves completely in ten seconds? Etc.

Is it purely the airtight seal that keeps the butter from turning, or is there some chemical or thermodynamic effect played by the water beyond just providing a seal? I like the idea of using a butter bell, but the potential for dripping water all over the table is a bit off-putting.

Okay, the whole false alarm about the kid in the UFO-balloon in Colorado today reminded me of a book of short stories I read as a kid. The premise was a bunch of clean-cut lads forming an inventors' club, and one of the stories had them make a balloon shaped like a UFO and then proceed to hoax the town with it for some reason or other. I think the title was something like Inventors' Club, or Boys' Inventing Club...but given the number of real organizations with similar names, it's pretty google-chaffed. The book had to be older than the mid-1970s, and had the feel of 1950s or early 1960s kleen preteen books in the vein of the original Encyclopedia Brown.

Okay, this one's something of a shot in the dark, as I don't remember enough details to make a google search productive.

When I was in grade school, I read a story about a young devil who decided he wanted to be good. He went to a Catholic school (I can't remember if his teacher was a regular nun or Mary herself, she did seem to have mystic abilities), and at the end of the story his horns fell off. The only other concrete detail I remember is a math problem he was posed, which went something like, "What number has one leg shorter than the other, and blue eyes?" He eventually wrote 189 and added eyes to the 8. The teacher brought the number to life and it limped away.

I'm pretty sure it was written prior to 1970, as I recall reading it in a somewhat musty hardcover book. But I don't remember if it was one of my mom's books, or something I got out of the school library (I went to Catholic grade school), so I really can't narrow it down any further than that. I think it was part of a textbook or anthology, not a full-length novel.

(As a purely irrelevant aside, I can't help but wonder if Mike Mignola read the same story as a kid and it helped inspire Hellboy. Then again, if it did inspire him, maybe someone who's a big Mignola fan would know the answer.)

I play a game called Monsterpocalypse, involving giant monsters rampaging around cities. One of the factions is based on mutated dinosaurs, and they all have faux-Latinate names. I was wondering if anyone out there would hazard a guess at appropriate Latinate pluralizations? I know that there's loads of rules and exceptions and cases and so forth, I'm just looking for plausible results. :)

Brontox (definitely female if that makes a difference)

Carnidon

Raptix

Spikodon

Terradax

Armodax

I have some guesses on a few, but I'd rather just stay mum and see what people who actually know Latin say first. :) Thanks!

Back when I was in grade school and a regular reader of Cricket Magazine, there was a story that lodged itself very effectively in my memory, to the point that thirty or so years on I can still retell it...except I can't remember any of the names, or the author. Googling around hasn't helped, so I figured I'd see if anyone here knew.

Here's the rough plot:

The POV character goes to a yard sale being held by a local "tall tale spinner" and asks about a scythe for sale. The old man explains why he couldn't possibly part with the scythe for less than some amount, and tells the tale of how the scythe helped him buy his house.

Back in the Great Depression, when the fat old man was a skinny young man, he'd heard that a fancy French restaurant back east was offering $2 a set for frogs' legs. Now, the local frog population was scary-smart...no one had ever caught even one, they'd run and hide at the first sign of danger. But our man had a plan. He called up the weather service and demanded to know, to the SECOND, when winter would hit his county. They hemmed and hawed and finally provided him the answer: the eleventh second of the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. (This bit is a big part of why I remember the story.) So he goes out to the swamp on Nov 9th with a chair, a gun, and the scythe.

The frogs scatter, and he sits down on the chair and commences to not move a muscle. After a day, they start to tentatively creep back in, their intelligence also coming with curiosity. By the morning of the 11th, they're practically ignoring him. With a few minutes before the start of winter, he stands up on the chair. The frogs start to scarper, but their curiosity is their undoing, and they stay to see what he'll do. At 11:11:09 he fires the gun. At 11:11:10 they jump for the water. At 11:11:11 winter hits, the swamp freezes solid, and there's a sea of frog legs sticking out of the ice. He harvests 'em with the scythe, sells them to the restaurant, and uses the money to buy a house.

The POV character ends up haggling the guy down to two bucks on the scythe anyway.

Anyone have a clue who wrote this and where I might find it short of finding someone with a complete set of late 70s Crickets?

I've been trying to figure out what a system of imprimitivity is, Wikipedia is no help, nor has my other searching been too enlightening. Every definition starts several steps beyond my expertise in group theory (i.e. I have almost no expertise in it, and what I have is a decade or so in the past).

Is it even possible to define imprimitivity without invoking theoretical jargon?

In looking up definitions of primitivity, it sounds like MAYBE imprimitivity is a quality whereby you can't completely derive any one element of a set from the other elements of the set, but that doesn't sound like it fits with the definitions I've found of imprimitivity (I may not understand what the Wiki entry says, but I can recognize some dissimilarities).

Okay, I know this is something I covered in grad school, but that was a while ago, and searching my notes and textbooks isn't helping.

I have data that I'm binning into two sets of two binomial categories: male/female and agree/disagree. Two-factor ANOVA isn't applicable because I don't have any variation within each bin, it's just a count. And I don't want to use means testing, since I don't think the data type is robust enough.

I know there's a test out there that lets you take data of the sort I have, and quantify the differences, but I can't remember or find it.

In other words, say I had 13 men agree, 16 men disagree, 24 women agree and 38 women disagree...from just that, what test would I use to figure out if there was a meaningful difference between men and women? (These aren't my real data, BTW, just making up numbers for illustrative purposes).

I'm working on a story set in Han Dynasty China, and three characters will be named "Seven Winds", "Red Beetle" and "Golden Swan". Modern Mandarin should be okay, since written Chinese hasn't changed much since the first Emperor standardized it, but if anyone actually knows a more suitable archaic form that'd be great!

Oh, and I only need a romanization, not to have it written in Chinese.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consort_Song says both the elder and younger Consorts Song took poison in 82 C.E. rather than wait for court intrigue to take a more gory path. But I can't find a reference to what date, or even rough time of the year, this happened. (I'm writing a time travel story and I want to get the details at least reasonably right.)