Sunday, October 28, 2007
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Block Game
This game does a great job of illustrating how a single event occurring at one point in space can drastically affect an event at another point, even though the two seem utterly unrelated due to their distance. As drastic as making the impossible possible. Sounds fuzzy, but you'll see what I mean if you play the game, especially level 21.
And so it goes, 'round and 'round like a merry-go-round. The above quote is taken from a children's book, Midnight Magic, a medieval mystery taking place a year before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, where reason and empiricism are pitted again magic and vengeful Shakespearean ghosts. The former pair win out this particular battle, but as suggested by the above quote, even their world is fated to be turned upside down- or spherical- in the coming months, though not by magic. The relationship between Magnus the magician and his servant Fabrizio is so reminiscent of the one between Merlin and the owl Archimedes (hoot hoot!) in The Sword in the Stone, that I wouldn't be surprised if the author, Ava, actually had them in mind when he sketched out his own two characters. Even the quote above reminds me a lot of the one to the side of this homepage.
Also, this Tuesday, the whole Science Times section was devoted to the topic of Snoozing. Besides the regular articles, they had sleep quotes running down the sidelines of the pages, sources ranging from an ancient Buddhist to English poets and playwrights to present-day physicists. One of these physicists was quoted as saying that he had a colleague who dreamt that he was an elementary particle. How...I...What I...yeah, I'm speechless. I read about them and make jokes about them, but to actually have dreamt about being one...he must be one quarky dude. I wonder if biologists dream about being DNA or proteins. A Day in the Life of a Nucleotide. The Adventures of Alph, the Elementary Particle. I think I'll pitch these ideas to Chronicle Books.
Speaking of grammar, to whom it concerns, I sort of take issue with the fact that the very British, very colloquial term "cadge" is included in the GRE verbal section. Isn't this an American test to get into American schools? As if we didn't have enough of a British invasion already. Fine! I'll learn it! But I'll learn it grudgingly! And maybe I wasn't speaking of grammar, but I was thinking about it (dreamed? dreamt? They both sound wrong to me), so I figured that was enough merit a transition.
--"Master, last week I spoke to a boy I know. He insists the world is round because his patron told him so. Stupid, yes, for any donkey can see with their own eyes that the world is flat. But is the boy mad to believe what his patron told him? Would you call every person who believes an impossible thing 'mad'?"
--"Fabrizio, if one sees what isn't there to see, madness is the only possible explanation. So, yes, if your friend insists the world is round, alas, he is mad."
And so it goes, 'round and 'round like a merry-go-round. The above quote is taken from a children's book, Midnight Magic, a medieval mystery taking place a year before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, where reason and empiricism are pitted again magic and vengeful Shakespearean ghosts. The former pair win out this particular battle, but as suggested by the above quote, even their world is fated to be turned upside down- or spherical- in the coming months, though not by magic. The relationship between Magnus the magician and his servant Fabrizio is so reminiscent of the one between Merlin and the owl Archimedes (hoot hoot!) in The Sword in the Stone, that I wouldn't be surprised if the author, Ava, actually had them in mind when he sketched out his own two characters. Even the quote above reminds me a lot of the one to the side of this homepage.
Also, this Tuesday, the whole Science Times section was devoted to the topic of Snoozing. Besides the regular articles, they had sleep quotes running down the sidelines of the pages, sources ranging from an ancient Buddhist to English poets and playwrights to present-day physicists. One of these physicists was quoted as saying that he had a colleague who dreamt that he was an elementary particle. How...I...What I...yeah, I'm speechless. I read about them and make jokes about them, but to actually have dreamt about being one...he must be one quarky dude. I wonder if biologists dream about being DNA or proteins. A Day in the Life of a Nucleotide. The Adventures of Alph, the Elementary Particle. I think I'll pitch these ideas to Chronicle Books.
Speaking of grammar, to whom it concerns, I sort of take issue with the fact that the very British, very colloquial term "cadge" is included in the GRE verbal section. Isn't this an American test to get into American schools? As if we didn't have enough of a British invasion already. Fine! I'll learn it! But I'll learn it grudgingly! And maybe I wasn't speaking of grammar, but I was thinking about it (dreamed? dreamt? They both sound wrong to me), so I figured that was enough merit a transition.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Opening Night For Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Cate Blanchett does a painfully amazing job at showing us that being a queen is not a position to be envied and not only because of the heavy getup she has to wear. I believe one of her dresses were actually winged. As if to conjure up a semiotic image of a queen bee? Who knows. Winged dresses, ugly red ramen-noodle hair wigs, and layers of Casper powder on my face? Thanks, I'll pass. What? But she got to kiss Clive Owen, you say? Well, she could have done much more than just kiss him if she hadn't been queen. Like explore other territories. North Carolina, Virginia, Conjugia*...But virgin mother to her people that she is, she has to remain in her palace and protect and fight for her people instead.
Clive Owen is given the most beautiful lines to go along with his beautiful self. No joke: the first time he came on screen, a more than audible sigh swept through the theater audience. I swear there were a few guys that joined in too! Owen plays the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, who was the one who settled the colony of Roanoke in North Carolina, the one that mysteriously disappeared with not a sole soul nor body left as evidence that a colony ever existed.
The Armada battle scene contained many individual artistic shots, but was overall an antisappointing montage sequence, choppy and not nearly as grand and majestic as we all expected it to be. It came off as perfunctory, the necessary battle sequence preceded by the necessary rallying speech, both of which fell flat compared to parallel scenes from Gladiator, LOTR, etc. Google spellcheck tells me "antisappointing" is not a word. Spellcheck be damned!
*This is a reference to a really funny joke made in the movie, which I won't tell just in case anyone goes to see the movie.
Also, I pulled a major crangie-ism today. Like MAJOR. It's practically unpublishable. There was a Mennonite involved. Sigh. I am incorrigible. Suddenly, I'm feeling punny.
Why do cars sleep?
Because they're tired!
Why do bicycles sleep?
Bicycles don't sleep.
Why is it that dogs bark, birds fly, and children who get their feet wet must take their medicine?
Because Mary Poppins said so.
Clive Owen is given the most beautiful lines to go along with his beautiful self. No joke: the first time he came on screen, a more than audible sigh swept through the theater audience. I swear there were a few guys that joined in too! Owen plays the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, who was the one who settled the colony of Roanoke in North Carolina, the one that mysteriously disappeared with not a sole soul nor body left as evidence that a colony ever existed.
The Armada battle scene contained many individual artistic shots, but was overall an antisappointing montage sequence, choppy and not nearly as grand and majestic as we all expected it to be. It came off as perfunctory, the necessary battle sequence preceded by the necessary rallying speech, both of which fell flat compared to parallel scenes from Gladiator, LOTR, etc. Google spellcheck tells me "antisappointing" is not a word. Spellcheck be damned!
*This is a reference to a really funny joke made in the movie, which I won't tell just in case anyone goes to see the movie.
Also, I pulled a major crangie-ism today. Like MAJOR. It's practically unpublishable. There was a Mennonite involved. Sigh. I am incorrigible. Suddenly, I'm feeling punny.
Why do cars sleep?
Because they're tired!
Why do bicycles sleep?
Bicycles don't sleep.
Why is it that dogs bark, birds fly, and children who get their feet wet must take their medicine?
Because Mary Poppins said so.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Collision
"Enervate" means to weaken vitality, not strengthen it? But this is absurd! In Harry Potter, the spell to re-awaken someone who's been knocked unconscious is enervate, so that word must mean to strengthen vitality! This is madness. It's utterly counter-intuitive! Either the wizarding world mislabeled their spell, or ETS and the Concise Oxford contain typos. I must write a letter to the latter pair disabusing them of their fanciful notions about the word...
There is this word, weltzschmertz, which means the feeling you get when your ideal world and the real world collide. Yep, I can feel it right now, weltzschmertz generated by a potterverse-reality collision. I wonder if we'll get a second moon out of this collision. According to a GRE reading-comprehension passage, the moon might have been a result of Earth's collision with another celestial heavy-weight.
On another note, I finally picked up a book by Noam Chomsky ("What We Say Goes"), and I should restrain myself from saying so after only having read 3/4 of 1 of his books, but no: he is brilliant. Admittedly, I have a tendency to idolize and idealize those I admire to an extent somewhere beyond what's called for. Still, the amount of knowledge contained in the man's brain is outrageous. A skillful debater includes examples and facts and figures in his arguments, and he seems to have a bottomless pit of them in every topic people throw his way. Which, albeit is usually related to politics or linguistics.
It's interesting to note how pro-Palestine he appears to be in the book. No, maybe I stated that incorrectly: I don't know if he's pro-Palestine, but he's completely against what he sees as US-Israel criminal activity/schoolhouse bullying. I don't know a lot of people who take the anti-Zionism stance, and when I asked a Jewish friend once, whether he supported the State of Israel, he replied "What do you mean? Of course I do!" Like, duh, what kind of answer was I looking for? I don't know,...with what little knowledge I have of the situation, it seems wrong to kick out hundreds of thousands of people from their homes just like that.
Also, Chomsky scares me the way he talks about nuclear warfare and the end of our species. But then he goes on to say later that Iran's not going to shoot nuclear missiles unless they want to commit mass suicide, in other words: not likely. Inconsistency there, but maybe I'm missing an element. A word or two about 9/11 conspiracies, the futility of name-calling in politics (and why it may actually help the one being verbally abused), and many other issues, written in the form of a dialogue between him and a journalist. The point of the book, as you can guess, is that the U.S. is an outlaw state, fully acknowledged, whatever we say goes, no matter how hypocritical or criminal. I just remembered one thing that the journalist mentioned in the book that cracked me up: Bush accused Iran of "meddling" in Iraq. No irony intended. What a riot.
A note about this other book I'm reading at the same time "Rich Dad, Poor Dad": Something about the methods to striking it rich that are described in the book strikes a bad chord with me. His methods seem sound and reasonable, and at first I was a most enthusiastic reader, thinking about buying mutual funds and all, but as I kept reading, I started to feel like something was wrong with some of his methods.
It took me a while to pinpoint the cause of my unease, but when he started raving about corporations, it hit me: it's exploitation. He's bragging about dooping people and ripping them off, and how you can make so much money by playing with corporations. How you can avoid taxes by spending as much of your asset-generated money as possible on fancy cars and dinners and vacations to Bali before taxes. And I really dislike the way he makes "hard-working professionals" and in particular, his own father ("poor dad") out to be idiots. It's awful. This is a major problem with our society, that there are people like him who think as long as your technically sticking to the rules- paying close attention to the wording so you can make loopholes- then what you're doing is perfectly okay, morally, and your winnings are justly obtained. He has good points, like the importance of differentiating between assets and liabilities, and everything he says makes sense, but is it enough to be technically true?
Oh, and today, I found myself flossing at the bookstore. I happened to have a little tooth-shaped container of dental floss in my backpack, and after eating an apple and a nectarine, I really, really needed to floss. I suppose I could've gone to the bathroom and done it in private. At any rate, Jess, I wish you were there to see it. It was a defining moment in my tooth-care career.
There is this word, weltzschmertz, which means the feeling you get when your ideal world and the real world collide. Yep, I can feel it right now, weltzschmertz generated by a potterverse-reality collision. I wonder if we'll get a second moon out of this collision. According to a GRE reading-comprehension passage, the moon might have been a result of Earth's collision with another celestial heavy-weight.
On another note, I finally picked up a book by Noam Chomsky ("What We Say Goes"), and I should restrain myself from saying so after only having read 3/4 of 1 of his books, but no: he is brilliant. Admittedly, I have a tendency to idolize and idealize those I admire to an extent somewhere beyond what's called for. Still, the amount of knowledge contained in the man's brain is outrageous. A skillful debater includes examples and facts and figures in his arguments, and he seems to have a bottomless pit of them in every topic people throw his way. Which, albeit is usually related to politics or linguistics.
It's interesting to note how pro-Palestine he appears to be in the book. No, maybe I stated that incorrectly: I don't know if he's pro-Palestine, but he's completely against what he sees as US-Israel criminal activity/schoolhouse bullying. I don't know a lot of people who take the anti-Zionism stance, and when I asked a Jewish friend once, whether he supported the State of Israel, he replied "What do you mean? Of course I do!" Like, duh, what kind of answer was I looking for? I don't know,...with what little knowledge I have of the situation, it seems wrong to kick out hundreds of thousands of people from their homes just like that.
Also, Chomsky scares me the way he talks about nuclear warfare and the end of our species. But then he goes on to say later that Iran's not going to shoot nuclear missiles unless they want to commit mass suicide, in other words: not likely. Inconsistency there, but maybe I'm missing an element. A word or two about 9/11 conspiracies, the futility of name-calling in politics (and why it may actually help the one being verbally abused), and many other issues, written in the form of a dialogue between him and a journalist. The point of the book, as you can guess, is that the U.S. is an outlaw state, fully acknowledged, whatever we say goes, no matter how hypocritical or criminal. I just remembered one thing that the journalist mentioned in the book that cracked me up: Bush accused Iran of "meddling" in Iraq. No irony intended. What a riot.
A note about this other book I'm reading at the same time "Rich Dad, Poor Dad": Something about the methods to striking it rich that are described in the book strikes a bad chord with me. His methods seem sound and reasonable, and at first I was a most enthusiastic reader, thinking about buying mutual funds and all, but as I kept reading, I started to feel like something was wrong with some of his methods.
It took me a while to pinpoint the cause of my unease, but when he started raving about corporations, it hit me: it's exploitation. He's bragging about dooping people and ripping them off, and how you can make so much money by playing with corporations. How you can avoid taxes by spending as much of your asset-generated money as possible on fancy cars and dinners and vacations to Bali before taxes. And I really dislike the way he makes "hard-working professionals" and in particular, his own father ("poor dad") out to be idiots. It's awful. This is a major problem with our society, that there are people like him who think as long as your technically sticking to the rules- paying close attention to the wording so you can make loopholes- then what you're doing is perfectly okay, morally, and your winnings are justly obtained. He has good points, like the importance of differentiating between assets and liabilities, and everything he says makes sense, but is it enough to be technically true?
Oh, and today, I found myself flossing at the bookstore. I happened to have a little tooth-shaped container of dental floss in my backpack, and after eating an apple and a nectarine, I really, really needed to floss. I suppose I could've gone to the bathroom and done it in private. At any rate, Jess, I wish you were there to see it. It was a defining moment in my tooth-care career.
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