roperties

The laser printer in my lab has never liked me. We had a full-on cold war back when I was taking classes. I g ess I tended to over-research writing assignments (I prided myself on those pages of "Literat re Cited"), which entailed printing o t lots and lots of pdfs. Freq ently the printer would just ref se. It got to the point where it wo ld print nothing from my comp ter. I'd have to trick it by logging in to a different machine and printing a few papers from it before the printer wised p and locked down, ref sing to print anything from anyone until it had been restarted. Cranky printer!

Since I've completed my co rsework and taken my q alifying exams, we've had an neasy tr ce. I haven't printed as m ch and it's cooperated with my req ests.

Until today. Now I am back to having printer tro bles. And they're m ch more s bversive than a blatant ref sal to print. The printer has decided to omit vario s letters from the paper I j st printed (which I'm mimicking here, obvio sly). Fort nately, it seems to be somewhat consistent. It had an especial bias against capital p, lowercase U, and small-cap R. I checked the original pdf, and it had all of its letters. Hmmm. Na ghty printer!

For instance, the paper is about "Modeling Soil-Landscape and Ecosystem roperties Using Terrain Attributes." One of the things that the a thors model is Net rimary roductivity. The paper starts with: "The unde standing [the first 2 words were in small caps, which is why the u is maintained and the r is lost] that topography modifies water flow and material redistrib tion processes and res lting ecosystem and soil patterns in landscapes ... has been reform lated and modified by n mero s st dies." I like that last bit (after the ellipsis) best.

I think it might be kind of f n to read this paper, if only for the p zzle of it. I can't g arantee that I'll retain any of the act al content, however.