Quote (and word) of the day

I wanted to share with you this great quote I read last night in the novel Fear of Flying by Erica Jong:

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

How true.

I haven't got much else to say really. I just blogged for a chat and because I liked that quote. It's a bit like when you phone a friend for no particular reason but just to hear their voice, say "hi" and have a chat. I don't really do that any more, which is a bit sad really.

Another interesting thing I learnt today is the meaning of the word "nonce". I don't know what I thought it meant but I didn't think it meant any of the definitions I found. I looked it up because it fell into a sentence I was reading at work, about web site authentication. The sentence was thus:

The server sends a nonce to be used in creating a digest of the user's password.

A what? I thought. Now, I think I thought a nonce was a silly person and I did wonder why the server would send a silly person to the browser so I looked it up and this is what I found:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaNonce may refer to:

• Cryptographic nonce, a number or bit string used only once in security engineering
• Nonce (slang), a sex offender or child sexual abuser
• Nonce word, a word used to meet a need that is not expected to recur
• The Nonce, a rap duo

Well, I never. Sex offender, indeed. I will never call anyone a nonce again. Not sure I ever did anyway but I certainly won't in future. (Obviously, in terms of the sentence above it means the first definition. I am surprised that it can also mean sex offender but am in no way implying that a web server sends a sex offender to the browser. That would be really, really creepy.)

Dictionary.com also claims it means:

the present, or immediate, occasion or purpose (usually used in the phrase for the nonce).

So there you go. And that's that from this rather random post.