Using "however"

Once in a while I'll get peeved enough by a widespread grammatical, spelling, or punctuation error that I'll carp about it here. For my very first such post, let's take the punctuation around "however."

From Technologizer contributor Ed Oswalt's piece on Microsoft's Kin:

Verizon is playing it off as part of a set of price reductions across its entire lineup, however most times when you see a price drop this early into a product’s lifespan, it has something to do with poor sales or not meeting certain goals.

Sorry, but that single comma before "however" is not correct. If you were to read the sentence out loud, you'd notice that when you reached "however," you paused longer than a comma would require. That's the sign that the all-purpose grammatical speed bump isn't sufficient.

The correct way to punctuate around "however" is with either a semicolon or period preceding it, and a comma following it:

Verizon is playing it off as part of a set of price reductions across its entire lineup; however, most times ...

or

Verizon is playing it off as part of a set of price reductions across its entire lineup. However, most times ...

If the whole thought is brief enough, a semicolon will do. For instance:

Most thought he was guilty; however, that was not the case.

Longer and more complex thoughts, like Oswalt's, should be punctuated as separate sentences. Even shorter ones can be punctuated as separate sentences for the purpose of emphasizing the contrary idea prefaced by "however":

Most thought he was guilty. However, that was not the case.

Another way that "however" can be used is illustrated -- incorrectly -- by another Technologizer posting, this time from David Worthington discussing some of Microsoft's plans for Windows 8:

There is however potential for an intelligent PC to really “know” its user and its environment, and it’s neat that Microsoft is looking into that.

This is a variant on the two-sentence usage of "however," and it could just as easily have been written thus:

However, there is potential for an intelligent PC to really “know” its user and its environment, and it’s neat that Microsoft is looking into that.

If, however, you want to use the construction Worthington attempted, you must frame "however" between commas:

There is, however, potential for an intelligent PC to really “know” its user and its environment, and it’s neat that Microsoft is looking into that.

And as long as we're on the subject, there's another use of "however" that doesn't require a trailing comma:

Money doesn't grow on trees, however much you may wish it did.

Here, "however" isn't serving to link ideas together in a conjunction-like way, as in prior examples. Rather, "however" is used in an adverbial sense to modify "much."

North Carolina atheists' ad vandalized

Organized religion has a stranglehold on the U.S. Most adherents of the monotheistic religions in the U.S. are at least civil if not completely accepting of other faiths (admittedly, it would be asking a lot for more than civility when the subject is religion). However, a disturbingly high-profile minority of cement-headed jackasses regards the least challenge to the putatively Christian character of the nation as a threat that must be countered by force or, as in this case, vandalism of a billboard suggesting that the Pledge of Allegiance worked quite nicely before Congress shoved "under God" into it.

Is this worse than Jake Knotts' ignorant braying about Nikki Haley's (possibly former) beliefs? I can't decide.

"One nation, indivisible." Is it so hard to imagine that phrase? More to the point, is it so damned threatening?

Until the hysteria of the McCarthy-era 1950s, "under God" was not part of the Pledge of Allegiance. A number of us believe we have the right to declare our allegiance to this country without simultaneously declaring an allegiance to a deity in which we do not believe.

To the ignorant and paranoid yahoos who decided a billboard was a threat to their precious religion -- all you've done is to confirm our suspicions that religion softens the brain. The defacement shows that you didn't start out with much in that department.

AT&T service

AT&T gets all kinds of grief for how badly it has handled the load imposed on its network by data-hungry smartphones like the Apple iPhone. It deserves that grief.

However, give it credit: AT&T does its best to discourage you from signing up for its service in the first place.

A while back, circumstances required that I sign up for AT&T wireless service. (UPDATE: actually, the provider was Cingular, then being absorbed by SBC. However, Cingular definitely had its roots in AT&T.) The company encouraged prospective customers to enroll on the Web for reasons that will become clear in a moment. The Web site walked me through a number of pages and took a while, largely because the servers took f-o-o-o-r-e-e-e-v-e-r to respond to input. In fact, my first attempt appeared to fail; my hazy recollection (this happened more than five years ago) is that the client-side software decided the transaction had timed out. I went through the tedious signup process again and appeared to succeed.

A week or so later, I got invoices for two new wireless accounts. Clearly, my first attempt hadn't failed as far as AT&T's servers were concerned. I'm sure there was an option to clear this up on the Web site, but I had had enough of those overloaded servers: it was time to talk to a human being on the phone.

Five solid minutes of phone-tree hell later, I understood why the company wanted would-be customers to use the Web. I had managed to avoid natural language-interpreting software until then; I mourn my loss of innocence. I speak unaccented American English and modestly claim that I do it well, yet every attempt to "speak" my needs (because, of course, there was no support for such a primitive mode of interaction as pressing one of the buttons on the phone) utterly baffled the software on the other end of the connection. Worse, every attempt to interpret my answers required two or three seconds of what I'm sure was intensive computation, and while a few seconds isn't long in general, in interactive terms it is an eternity.

Eventually I got to a dead end: the software was responding in a way that suggested it wasn't going to route my call properly on its own any time soon, and I couldn't imagine trying to walk back up the decision tree to a point where talking to an operator was a supported operation. I gave up and called in again, enduring another five minutes of disgracefully inefficient and gratingly cheerful promptings to speak my request. (Why the devil that software couldn't respond the way the marginally less annoying keypad-oriented software does -- meaning that the software is ready to acknowledge your response as soon as the prompt is being read -- is beyond me.) By the time I managed to convince that never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed software that I wanted to talk to flesh and blood, it felt like the seasons had changed -- multiple times.

Years went by, and the time came to order DSL for a new residence. Once again, the Web was my first stop. Once again, I found myself unimpressed by AT&T's servers. After several minutes of comparing available options, I made my selection -- except I didn't: I got back a "Systems Unavailable" error. I waited, tried again, and things appeared to succeed, except for a small problem in which I had to fill out a form twice. A little more time passed, then I got email informing me my order had not succeeded and I had to call customer service. It turned out that when the Web site noticed my error in filling out the form, it had saved all of the information I had typed in (a good thing), but had inexplicably reset a pull-down menu to its default (empty) value. In advising me of my own mistake, the server software introduced one of its own and thus dished my order. Wonderful.

During the customer-service call, I had occasion to walk through AT&T's Web site again to verify the company's service offerings. It turns out that if you make a mistake filling out the form asking for your address (a fallback if the search-by-phone-number doesn't find DSL is available), the server doesn't handle the error at all well. It prompts you for the same information again (in an apparently unformatted form and without having preserved the information you had already entered), but is unable to process the form: every submission simply results in the server presenting that form again. I had to restart at the top of the site.

Hey, Ma Bell (yeah, you've gotten big enough that the old moniker applies once more), listen up. Your so-called high-speed Internet offerings are only palatable because your only competition, my evil cable provider, offers exactly one expensive tier of service that is overkill for my needs. I'd like to save some money and you're the beneficiary of my parsimony. But if you can't get your act together so that contracting for service with you isn't a colossal waste of my time and an exercise in raising my blood pressure for no good reason, you can take your crummy offerings and choke on them.

Nigerian spills are worse than the Gulf

I hate that this is news to me: Nigeria suffers from worse annual oil spillage than has been suffered in the Gulf of Mexico.

The scale of the pollution is mind-boggling. The government's national oil spill detection and response agency (Nosdra) says that between 1976 and 1996 alone, more than 2.4m barrels contaminated the environment. "Oil spills and the dumping of oil into waterways has been extensive, often poisoning drinking water and destroying vegetation. These incidents have become common due to the lack of laws and enforcement measures within the existing political regime," said a spokesman for Nosdra.

That's the government agency acknowledging that over twenty years, Nigeria suffered the equivalent of over nine Exxon Valdez-sized spills. (The Valdez spilled 10.8 million gallons, or over 257,000 barrels. One barrel of crude oil is 42 gallons.)

For reference, according to the New York Times, the U.S. government estimate of oil spilled in the Gulf incident is anywhere between 37 million gallons (about 881,000 barrels) and 105.5 million gallons (over 2.5 million barrels) as of 20 June 2010.

Here's where you and I come in:

With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution.

40% of U.S. crude oil is supplied by a country being devastated, environmentally and politically, by the pursuit of that oil.

We have got to reduce our crude oil consumption. We need more fuel-efficient vehicles. We need alternatives to fossil fuels to supply our current vehicle fleet, and long-term, we need vehicles that don't burn fossil fuels at all. We need an energy grid whose inputs are sustainable and home-grown: wind, water, solar, and everything else a national Manhattan Project-scale R&D push can devise.

And if you haven't thought long and hard about how to reduce your driving, and your electricity usage (how do you think a lot of that electricity is generated?), it's past time to start -- and then to make the changes you can.

"fishgrease" and an explanation of "booming"

Normally I don't care that I'm way, way the hell behind on news and current events, because you can generally hear the echoes for weeks so you don't end up missing much. However, that means I occasionally miss good tidbits whose impact doesn't create echoes loud enough for me to hear, even though the content is, or at least looks, accurate and important. Such is the case with "fishgrease"'s introduction to booming, or the art of diverting and redirecting the flow of oil in large bodies of water. Warning: the linked piece contains copious profanity. I think that's far less offensive than what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico, but your mileage may vary.

Caveat: I have no idea whether whether "fishgrease," the otherwise unidentified DailyKos poster's handle, is actually what he claims to be, an oil industry worker with more than thirty years' experience. I also have no idea whether his summary of booming and his criticisms of the BP-led booming efforts in the Gulf of Mexico is accurate.

All that said, "fishgrease" sounds like somebody who knows what he's talking about. Unlike everything coming from BP and the federal government, this information makes sense. There is no easy solution here, but if "fishgrease" is right, what BP and the Coast Guard are doing is about as far from anything like an actual solution as you can get.

I've been searching in Google for someone who is willing to go on the record as a verifiable oil industry employee or former employee to confirm or to refute "fishgrease"'s posting. It has only been a half-hour of searching but I'm already predicting I won't find anyone.

Usually, remarks as direct and as pungent as "fishgrease"'s elicit a contradicting response from an industry as big and as sensitive to its public image as Big Oil. Given BP's demonstrated record of indifference to safety, its credibility on technical matters affecting the safety of Gulf residents--technical matters like booming, for instance--should be priority number one for its public relations department. In this case, silence speaks volumes.

If that's the case, you might be asking (especially if you lean conservative and notice that it's the progressive blogosphere that has embraced "fishgrease"'s postings), why is "fishgrease" seemingly the only one blogging about how badly BP and the federal government are mismanaging the spill response? My guess is that the people who actually know how to do spill remediation all work for either the oil industry or the Coast Guard. If these people were caught contradicting their superiors, they'd be disciplined, probably fired.

The better question is, why has the Obama administration been all but complicit in BP's criminal mismanagement of both the spill and the original drilling? Why, in particular, did the administration, via the Coast Guard, rely so heavily on BP's estimates of the severity of the spill in the immediate aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion?

Rolling Stone claims that the administration has embraced offshore drilling in exchange for Senate action on climate-change legislation. If true, that's ... really, really, really dumb. Obama needs to realize that placating less well-informed politicos -- and their even less well-informed constituents -- is a losing proposition. If he wants to justify his election, he has to stop treating with these people and start educating them. That's why the bully pulpit exists.

Login isn't a verb

Fighting online illiteracy is like bailing out a leaky rowboat with a teaspoon. Nevertheless, I respect those who try, including whoever cobbled up loginisnotaverb.com. I'm sorry to say that my quick gloss of it suggests it's patronizing in spots, but it claims to be targeted at, among others, non-native speakers so maybe I'm misinterpreting great attention to covering all bases.

In any case, "login" isn't a verb. Kindly remember that.

Toy Story meets The Wire

The Wire, filtered through Toy Story. Ingenious and hilarious (and NSFW language, if you care).