October 2009
2 tags
Measuring meaning
Presumably, to be succinct means to cram a lot of meaning into few words. Best of Wikipedia (as always, thoroughly enjoyable) informs me that mamihlapinatapai is “listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the ‘most succinct word’”. That must mean it’s the single word that packs the most meaning, in any language. Whenever I hear of someone quantifying words, I...
Word-o-Matic →
Make your own Markov Chain generator. Like Norse gods or organic compounds. It works better if you have lots of words. I made one that generates names of Tumblr staff members, but there are too few names to really create anything interesting: it keeps cycling between some, like “Armentain”, “Davidani”, “Marcob”, “Chrice”, “Jaco”, and the...
I wish more people were doing stuff like this:
Guest post on Jason Santa Maria’s blog.
Post on Dustin Curtis’s blog.
Article in The Bold Italic.
One of the great things about magazines is that all the articles don’t look alike. They’re free to expand, subtract, multiply, divide, paint, rotate, spin, glare, surprise and amuse, not only in content but also in form....
“Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have...”
– Louis Menand. (via 3qd)
Darwin Among the Machines (1863) →
We regret deeply that our knowledge both of natural history and of machinery is too small to enable us to undertake the gigantic task of classifying machines into the genera and sub-genera, species, varieties and sub-varieties, and so forth, of tracing the connecting links between machines of widely different characters, of pointing out how subservience to the use of man has played that part...
“Always remember to close all parentheses. We’re not paying to air...”
– Fake AP Stylebook.
Anon is Dead (1926) →
I’m not sure if it’s uplifting or depressing to discover that people in the 1920s were concerned about the same things you are. It could mean that this is an eternal problem, which is sad, because presumably it’s hard if not impossible to solve a problem where generations have failed; alternatively, it could mean that someone worked out the solutions to these problems before,...
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto →
School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
Wow.
I’m not going to argue, because I love learning, but schools over the years have made a concerted effort to kill that love affair. Reforming or replacing schools is a daunting prospect, though. Some consider it...
Sometimes I can’t think of anything to write on this blog. Everyone who writes anything except when they’re forced to has experienced the feeling. I try not to write anything at those times because I want to be humble: I don’t want to waste anyone’s time writing about nothing just to write. What draws me back is always that I notice, again, that not everyone thinks like I...
“English is essentially what happens when you can’t decide whether the...”
– John M. Ford, via Essentialist Explanations, “a list of 989 ‘essentialist explanations’ of the form ‘Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z’.”
1 tag
The Origins of Language: Divine Providence or... →
Through a blog I found this essay, written by the 11th century scholar Ibn Hazm, on the origins of language. The fact that people were speculating about this a thousand years ago is interesting enough, but Ibn Hazm has some decidedly modern thoughts about language, making this particularly interesting. He decides that the origin of spoken language is instruction from Allah, because the...
Stigler's law of eponymy →
Blaise Pascal wasn’t the first to describe his eponymous triangle. While reading about it, I learned that in other parts of the world, the triangle is named after other people who at one time or another described it. Thus, w(iki)erified, the triangle is called the Khayyam triangle in Iran, after the astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyám; Yang Hui’s triangle in China; and...
Unequal Beauty Silence →
Robin Hanson asks: why are we so unconcerned about inequalities arising from beauty or the lack thereof? The question was inspired by this op-ed, which states: “most champions of the less privileged have never made a practical effort to mitigate the social differences caused by the inequitable distribution of what, nowadays, is a factor with an enormous socioeconomic impact: beauty.”
...
Avmakt.
I think I discovered an untranslatable but very useful word today. I don’t know how I was reminded of it, but it’s great. (I’ll show you, later on.) The word is avmakt, which is Norwegian for “the opposite of power”. I went through a thesaurus and none of the antonyms of “power” captured the precise meaning of this word.
It’s being powerless, but...
If anyone wants to start up Fuck Yeah, Irony, I contribute the following fact: according to this and this, Upper Slaughter is a Thankful Village, one of the few British villages that lost no men during World War I. (There’s also a Lower Slaughter which is not.)
Fancy that.
“You have broken the scepter of despotism, you have pronounced the beautiful...”
– Women’s Petition to the French National Assembly, 1789. The petition included a proposal for a decree giving women rights equal to those of men. The fifth point is this: “That wearing breeches will no longer be the exclusive prerogative of the male sex, but each sex will have the right...
Klemens Wenzel, Prince von Metternich →
This dude was the greatest diplomat in Europe in the period 1815 to 1848. His efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples were extraordinary. In fact, he, more than any other person, was the one who united just about every nation in Europe — impressive, given that Europe was a patchwork of smaller states, a lot more than there are today — in the...
There’s a mouse between me and the floor above. I can hear it running around in the ceiling, occasionally squeaking. The sinister plan to attract the mouse with a bit of cheese and decapitate it doesn’t appear to be working. Maybe it has performance anxiety, knowing that I’ll be describing its every movement and broadcasting them on the internet, because it went quiet almost the...
Can Bad Men Make Good Brains Do Bad Things? →
An ethical puzzle.
The Embedding Problem →
One last post about truth, for the time being. Henry V writes:
The whole point about being expressivist about morality is that one thereby holds that there just is no fact of the matter as to whether or not moral claims are true - they have no propositional content, and are therefore precisely not “tied to the norms of truth.” Tied to norms, yes, but not those of truth - and certainly not the sort...
Dynamism, Legacy of the Visigoths →
“Dynamic” is technical jargon used by programmers, meaning “good”. It derives from the Latin dyno mite, meaning “I am extremely pleased”, and is first recorded in the historical work Bona Aetas of noted Roman sage and pundit J.J. Walker. Its meaning evolved in the 4th century after monks copying an obscure manuscript on programming linguistics in their...
I knew I’d be opening up for misunderstandings when I wrote about truth, but I didn’t (and don’t) have the energy to write the one big article about truth that clarifies once and for all everything there is to know about truth. (I don’t feel qualified to, either, but with sufficient energy I could manage to write a decent account of my personal views on the matter, but that...
Truth is not multiple
I wish truth was a holy word. I wish we were more reverential when talking about truth. Talking about truth should be a little like talking about a god: we should do so only rarely, and when we do, on the assumption that we’re only barely worthy, that we are speaking about something that’s above us and that we can never fully understand.
I’m not advocating a mysticism about...
Hip-Hop Physics →
The title is a bad pun: it’s about how electrons hopping around on a lattice can explain magnetism. That’s interesting in itself, and the fact that the article appears to take its readers seriously enough to spend some time going over the practical and theoretical issues in detail is welcome. You don’t see that often.
What interests me more, though, is that this is a wonderful...
Sexy prime →
A sexy prime is a pair of prime numbers that differ by six. Hence the first sexy prime is (5, 11).
1 tag
Ironic process theory →
Ironic processing is the psychological process whereby an individual’s deliberate attempts to suppress or avoid certain thoughts (thought suppression) render those thoughts more persistent. A classic example is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s quote from Winter notes on summer impressions: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come...
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The Art of Fiction: Jack Kerouac (pdf) →
The Paris Review interviewed Jack Kerouac in 1968. In the beginning, there’s a description of how Ted Berrigan, who had persuaded Kerouac to do the interview, simply showed up on his door one day with two of his friends, and how Kerouac’s wife almost threw them out, because “it seems that people still show up constantly at the Kerouacs’s looking for the author of On the...
Sagas
I have a mythical uncle. He’s not mythical because he didn’t exist, but because he died before I was born, and so all I’ve ever experienced is the mythos surrounding him. None of my other relatives can compete. Both my parents were born late, when their parents weren’t young any more, so both my grandfathers, on my mother’s side and on my father’s, were dead by...
The Last Town on Earth: An Interview with Thomas... →
The Last Town on Earth was named the Best Debut Novel of 2006 by U.S.A. Today – who describe it as “an absorbing depiction of a utopian town that attempts to keep the 1918 flu epidemic at bay” – and it won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Excellence in Historical Fiction.
We spoke to Mullen about his novel, about the historical research that informed it, and about the moral...
The scene that smells of zine spirit →
I admit it: I’m enamored with print. There’s something different about physical artifacts, which isn’t necessarily better than the all-virtual artifacts of 2009. It feels better when you see it simply because it’s rare — it’s like if you’ve been eating chocolate ice cream for years, any other flavor would taste amazing simply because it provides different...