commonplace book

From Neal Stephenson, writing in The New York Times:

Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: “geeking out” and “vegging out.” To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal – and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means.

From Slate:

Arabic is a VSO language, which means the verb usually comes before the subject and object. It has a dual number, so nouns and verbs must be learned in singular, dual, and plural. A present-tense verb has 13 forms. There are three noun cases and two genders. Some European languages have just as many forms to keep track of, but in Arabic the idiosyncrasies can be mind-boggling. When Karam explains that numbers are marked for gender—but most numbers take the opposite gender from the word they are modifying—we students stare at each other in slack-jawed solidarity. When we learn that adjectives modifying nonhuman plurals always have a feminine singular form—meaning that “the cars are new” comes out as “the cars, she are new”—I can hear heads banging on the desks around me.

This is a fabulous list that I’m going to keep in mind as I try to grit my teeth when I hear ignorance on the radio, TV, & in person.

Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They lobby for creationist ideas such as “intelligent design” to be taught as alternatives to evolution in science classrooms. As this article goes to press, the Ohio Board of Education is debating whether to mandate such a change. Some antievolutionists, such as Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial, admit that they intend for intelligent-design theory to serve as a “wedge” for reopening science classrooms to discussions of God.

Besieged teachers and others may increasingly find themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism. The arguments that creationists use are typically specious and based on misunderstandings of (or outright lies about) evolution, but the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage.

To help with answering them, the following list rebuts some of the most common “scientific” arguments raised against evolution. It also directs readers to further sources for information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom. [Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense]

This is really old, but if it was true then, think about what must be going on now.

A group of computer programmers at Tsinghua University in Beijing is writing software using Java technology. They work for IBM. At the end of each day, they send their work over the Internet to an IBM facility in Seattle.

There, programmers build on it and use the Internet to zap it 5,222 miles to the Institute of Computer Science in Belarus and Software House Group in Latvia. From there, the work is sent east to India’s Tata Group, which passes the software back to Tsinghua by morning in Beijing, back to Seattle and so on in a great global relay that never ceases until the project is done.

‘We call it Java Around the Clock,’ says John Patrick, vice president of Internet technology for IBM. ‘It’s like we’ve created a 48-hour day through the Internet.’

Source: Maney, Kevin. "Technology is ‘demolishing’ time, distance". USA Today (24 April 1997). http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cta329.htm. Accessed 25 April 1997.

This is really old, but it’s still interesting & worth considering.

"So what can content producers do to make their Internet services more valuable? If, as the AEA/NASDAQ study proclaims, the IT industry has already generated $866 billion this decade, how do we get some of that?

The answer is by adding value to information, by becoming the manufacturers of information products that somehow transform and package information, the new raw material. How?

Well, there are two ways to add value to information. The first way is to provide information consumers with a way to access and manipulate information, so the raw information becomes more meaningful. On the Web you can do this by building databases with tremendous flexibility, searchability, and customization. Think about the way Bloomberg first allowed subscribers to generate analytical graphs and other kinds of models to real-time market data. That’s a valuable added service that makes something out of the raw material of real-time market quotes.

The second way you can add value to raw information is by transforming it into knowledge. How do you do that? By building up context, applying institutional knowledge, and otherwise adding perspective and vision to the raw stuff to make it into something bigger and better. … It’s also what high-end editorial products like newspapers have always done." [Source: Chervokas, Jason. Email from The New York Internet Newsletter (21 November 1997)]

When a magician dies (a real, entertainment magician, not one who practices white or black magic, which I don’t believe in anyway), there is a traditional broken-wand ceremony, in which members of the Society of American Magicians break the dead person’s wand, symbolizing that it has lost its magic. The broken-wand ceremony was first held in 1926 after Houdini’s death.

Now this is interesting – it definitely says something about our ability to work around restrictions, provided we remain unaware that the restrictions exist in the first place.

One day in 1939, George Bernard Dantzig, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, arrived late for a graduate-level statistics class and found two problems written on the board. Not knowing they were examples of “unsolvable” statistics problems, he mistook them for part of a homework assignment, jotted them down, and solved them. (The equations Dantzig tackled are perhaps more accurately described not as unsolvable problems, but as unproved statistical theorems for which he worked out proofs.) Six weeks later, Dantzig’s statistic professor notified him that he had prepared one of his two “homework” proofs for publication, and Dantzig was given co-author credit on another paper several years later when another mathematician independently worked out the same solution to the second problem. [The Unsolvable Math Problem]

"Continuing to Calais, Edward [III] began a lengthy siege. … Calais Surrendered in August, 1347. Edward was particularly lenient in not killing the garrison and population for resisting him. Six of the towns Burgesses were ordered to appear before him with ropes around their necks and the town’s keys, and to submit to his will, Philippa persuaded him not to execute them." [The Medieval Combat Society; also see Edward III. of Windsor – The Story of the Siege of Calais for a longer version]

From “Celebrities face the ‘piñata syndrome’” in The L. A. Times:

As a result, every story has an abbreviated life span, accelerating the demand for more news. Ultimately, this adds up to exaggerated expectations of celebrities. If they can’t maintain their public persona, they’re devoured for our entertainment instead.

“I call it the piñata syndrome,” says publicist Howard Bragman, founder of the Hollywood PR firm Bragman Nyman Cafarelli. “It’s really about the media. They’re only lifting you up so that they can take sticks and beat you and see what comes out.”

"New research shows why it doesn’t take much for a new problem or an unfamiliar task to tax our thinking. According to University of Queensland cognitive science researchers …, the number of individual variables we can mentally handle while trying to solve a problem (like baking a lemon meringue pie) is relatively small: Four variables are difficult; five are nearly impossible. …

It’s difficult to measure the limits of processing capacity because most people automatically use problem solving skills to break down large complex problems into small, manageable ‘chunks.’ A baker, for example, will treat “cream butter, sugar and egg together” as a single chunk — a single step in the process — rather than thinking of each ingredient separately. …

The researchers found that, as the problems got more complex, participants performed less well and were less confident. They were significantly less able to accurately solve the problems involving four-way interactions than the ones involving three-way interactions, and they were (not surprisingly) less confident of their solutions. And five-way interactions? Forget it. Their performance was no better than chance.

After the four- and five-way interactions, participants said things like, ‘I kept losing information,’ and ‘I just lost track.’" [How much can your mind keep track of?]