fiona-h

New blog

2011-11-18T18:50:00.000-08:00

I don't update this blog anymore, although I still read and welcome and respond to comments. My new blog, which doesn't have any puzzles, is here.

morbid

2010-09-01T14:49:00.001-07:00

If only dead people understand hexadecimal, how many people understand hexadecimal?

Book Commercial - Treasure Island

2009-04-01T11:06:00.000-07:00

As Jim Trelease says in The Read-Aloud Handbook, one of Oprah Winfrey's great contributions to a renewed interest in reading in the United States is her ability to function as a commercial for a book. This really struck me, and it's something that I've been endeavoring to do when I read aloud. Build the book up before you begin! I had a recent experience with my own children, who are sometimes reluctant to settle in to listening to a new book if the style is unfamiliar, that shows how “hype” can really make a difference.

My son was given Treasure Island for his 6th birthday last June. At the time, I hadn't read it, and — although I knew it had something to do with treasure (clever) and I thought there were possibly pirates in it — I didn't give my son any introduction. I didn't even know if I would enjoy it myself. I launched straight into it without preamble:

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17--, and go back to the time when my father kept the “Admiral Benbow” inn, and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof (p. 3).

Ninety words in the opening sentence! My 6-year-old balked, and no wonder. But then one day I decided to read Treasure Island to myself. I couldn't put it down. And then I went to the Internet and looked up Robert Louis Stevenson and things like “black spot,” “Davy Jones,” and “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.” Now I was prepared to be a commercial for this book.

Theo had seen me reading Treasure Island, and heard me “oohing” and “aahing” when it got exciting or scary, and he wanted to know what was happening. I showed him the poem “Fifteen men on a dead man's chest,” which was familiar to him from watching Pirates of the Caribbean, and I told him that it was written by the author of Treasure Island. I told him that there were vicious pirates and lots of danger. Now and then I would give him a taste, saying something like: “Oh no! The little boy in this book is making friends with a pirate – but he doesn't know he's a pirate! He should know! He was told to watch out for a one-legged man! And this guy has only one leg, Theo! What is going to happen?!?” When I finished reading the book myself, I immediately started it from the beginning again, this time reading aloud to both of my kids, who were hanging on to every word. And while I did skip over some lengthy descriptive passages, I didn't substitute any of the difficult vocabulary. In that first sitting, I read them eight chapters and they begged for me to go on. We finished the entire book in only five sessions, and it's over 300 pages long. Because I had done a little research, I was able to explain a bit about the black spot and other things that might have otherwise been a bit obscure. I wouldn't have been able to do that if my first reading and theirs had been simultaneous. We're now reading Kidnapped by the same author.

Waste / Waist

2008-07-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

Note: I originally posted this a year ago and then deleted it. It's worth re-posting, I think.

Funny story. It involves homophones.

Today an acquaintance and I were talking about our various little strategies for maintaining our weight. I said, "I eat an egg every morning!" She said (or rather, I heard):"I measure my waste every day."

?????!

For four hours, I believed that this woman scooped her waste out of the toilet and either laid it down along a ruler or weighed it on one of those little scales. Do people really do this?? And if they do do it, do they mention it casually to an office acquaintance? It was only when I got home and was telling the story (with relish, I confess) to my husband that I realized my mistake. As soon as I heard the words leaving my own mouth, I understood what this woman had said:

"I measure my waist every day."

Still a bit over-diligent perhaps, but A Lot Less Weird.

Margot Hanington Obituary Notice

2008-06-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

This will appear in tomorrow's newspapers in Vancouver BC, Victoria BC, and Halifax NS.

Hanington, Margot (Wallace)
Margot Hanington passed away swiftly and gracefully in Victoria B.C. on Sunday, June 15. A resident of South Surrey, she was born in New Brunswick in 1923, and grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia where she was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Pre-deceased by her husband Rear Admiral Daniel Hanington, she leaves four children: Gillian (Bobby Korpi) of Ajijic, Mexico; Mark (Gloria Garvey) of Kailua, Hawaii; Brian (Deborah Johnson) of Ottawa; and Felicity (Larry Dawe) of Texada Island, as well as 10 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren. She also leaves one brother, Lt. Cdr. Howard Wallace of Ottawa, Ontario and two sisters: Rosemary McDonald and Isabel Wallace, both of Halifax, N.S. Also surviving is her partner Robert Welland of South Surrey, B.C. and his sons, daughter and their spouses, all dear to her as well. The funeral service will be held at St. Paul’s Church in Esquimalt B.C. on Thursday June 19 at 2 p.m. Reception following at the Union Club, Victoria at 4 p.m.

Two Boasts

2008-06-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

Two boasts about my relations' recent press:

My sister, Kyla Hanington, on CBC's The Sunday Edition. Listen to her amazing essay, Making Muffins.

A review of three pieces by my cousin, Crystal Pite, that were performed at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa as part of the Canada Dance Festival. The review appeared in today's Ottawa Citizen (June 16, 2008). Crystal appeared on CBC's The National on Friday, but I can't find a digital clip of it to share.

Atheist Game

2008-06-03T21:05:00.001-07:00

Have you seen this game by Zefrank? Cute.

Phoque

2008-06-02T22:11:00.000-07:00

My nearly-6-year-old son loves the A-word. My fault, really, for teaching him and his sister Miss Susie Had a Steamboat:

Miss Susie had a steamboat
The steamboat had a bell
The steamboat went to Heaven
Miss Susie went to...

Hello operator
Give me number 9
And if you disconnect me
I'll kick you from...

Behind the 'frigerator
There was a piece of glass
Miss Susie fell upon it
And broke her little...

Ask me no more questions
Tell me no more lies
Miss Susie's in the kitchen
Making her mud pies

I love that song, and was relieved recently to see it reproduced in The Daring Book for Girls. Now no one will know it came from me.

Other than that, so far the only curse in my children's lexicon has been the I-word: I'm telling.

My daughter told me today, however, that the French word for seal is rather bad in English. This was the rumour on the playground, at least. My French is ghastly, so I just looked it up myself on Bablefish. A little trial and error was required to communicate the correct definition of the word. (I really need my old-fashioned paper-bound French-English dictionary.) I finally tried:

seal (animal)

.... and I see what she's getting at. But I can hardly forbid them to say the French word for seal, can I? I can already see them trying to work it into conversations. Soon they'll want to head to the harbour for "no reason" or make lists of the "cutest animals that swim."

Stephen Fry reading "The Letter"

2008-05-31T10:30:00.000-07:00

Just look what I found on YouTube. It's a baby Stephen Fry. What joy!

Some of my favorite lines:

I tipped the delivery boy out of the window with more than ordinary generosity.

Prudence had demanded that I leave her behind, so I was alone.

Of all the hideously disfigured spectacles I have ever beheld, those perched on the end of this man's nose remained forever pasted in the album of my memory.

Walking with a pronounced limp -- L-I-M-P, pronounced "limp."

And my favorite:

I asked him the nature of the Count's business but he made the sign of the cross and said nothing. I asked him why there were no mirrors in the castle, but this time he made the sign of the very cross indeed and spat.

In stuck chins

2008-05-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

My daughter is in Grade 2. Today I see that she's written this in her notebook:

In stuck chins for cheese pizza
1. Make the doe
2. Put it in a cercle shape
3. Put the soss on
4. Put the cheese on
5. Put in the oven

Does technical writing run in the family?
I used to write in stuck chins all day long.

Floral delivery

2008-05-21T22:22:00.000-07:00

Someone died on my street last year. I saw the makeshift shrine appear on the telephone pole the day after the car accident: flowers, photos, messages, a cross. Over the next couple of weeks the flowers died and the photos became water-stained. One day, as I waited at a bus stop across the street, I saw a Volkswagen beetle with a florist's logo pull up beside the telephone pole. The driver got out with a delivery of fresh flowers. I saw him stop and look at the address on the label, then at the telephone pole, and again at the label. He'd been asked to deliver flowers to a telephone pole.

Pundle

2008-04-07T20:53:00.000-07:00

Another pundle:

Note that the sad crappiness of the drawing is not significant — at least, not to the solution. I'm using the AMC Gremlin* of drawing tools: MS Paint.

* I once had a boyfriend who drove one of these. I'm not as old as that makes me sound!

Expelled

2008-03-25T19:08:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Jeff for passing on a link to this post:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/expelled.php

Read it and smile. But then ask yourself: who are these midwestern police officers who remove atheists from movie theatre line ups?

Fforde

2008-03-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

My friend Richard put me on to Jasper Fforde. I'm halfway through his second book in the Tuesday Next series, Lost in a Good Book, and am just loving it. Watch this space for a thoughtful review—but make sure you set a timeout interval or you're liable to expire before one appears.

For now, let me just say that I've seen comparisons to Terry Prachett and Douglas Adams, but neither seems quite right to me. These books are meatier. They are full of literary allusions; I'm madly taking notes of things I should read or re-read or research to see if they're real or made-up as I work through them. Right after reading The Eyre Affair, I beelined for a copy of Jane Eyre in the bookshop. I meant to buy it and read it, thus filling one of many embarrassing (but not unexpected) gaps in my literary education, but I'll sheepishly tell you that instead I just flipped straight to the end to see whether or not Jane actually ended up with Rochester. (She did! Hoorah!)

I'll do my best to marshall my thoughts about these books into something sensible for my next post.

Begging the Question

2008-02-18T19:57:00.000-08:00

T-rex always puts it so much better than I can. Awesome.

"I select you"

2008-02-15T23:49:00.000-08:00

A day late....

skepchick has posted some Darwinian Valentine's Day cards. Things like: Your secondary sexual characteristics bring all the boys to the gene pool. Have a look; it's a cute idea. (But they're not nearly as funny as I'd hoped!)

Ever better is G. Pullum's Language Log post from last year: The Prescriptivist Valentine. ("And remember, when a grammarian kisses you, you stay kissed").

6 Matches, 4 Triangles

2008-01-21T21:30:00.001-08:00

Use 6 identical matchsticks to create 4 equilateral triangles. The solution does not require you to break any matches.

Dinesh is Freaking Me Out

2008-01-08T20:34:00.000-08:00

Dinesh D'Souza's blog is freaking me out. A couple of his recent articles, "How Atheists Celebrate Christmas" and "Why Atheists Are Such Lousy Debaters" are full of slanderous (at worst) and silly (at best) ad hominem attacks:

Drunk: "... Hitchens reaches for his glass with the same alacrity* that fundamentalists reach for the Bible."

This undermines Hitchens's arguments.... how, exactly?

Drunk and silly: "...[an atheist Christmas is] bitter guys making sophomoric jokes and staggering out of the room inebriated."

That's why I like it so much. I can't think of a better combination than bitter guys, sophomoric jokes, and inebriated staggering! No matter what time of year!

Scared: "... these guys are scared to debate me."

Scared? Umm, no; I don't think so. In The Devil's Chaplain, published a few years before The God Delusion, Dawkins includes a series of letters that he exchanged with the late Stephen J. Gould. Although those two didn't agree on everything, they did agree on this: debating creationists gives creationists an undeserved legitimacy. News for you, Dinesh: Dawkins was quite settled in this position long before you started tugging on his shirtsleeve. Here's an excerpt from a letter that Gould sent to Dawkins in 2001 (boldface mine):

...we have the advantage [over creationists] that evolutionary scientists don't need the publicity that such debates can bring. In the unlikely event that a significant argument should ever emerge from the ranks of creationism/'intelligent design', we will be happy to debate it. Meanwhile, we shall cultivate our evolutionary gardens, occasionally engaging in the more exacting and worthwhile task of debating each other. What we shall not do is abet creationists in their disreputable quest for free publicity and unearned academic respectability.

* Good word though. "Like it, centurion; like it, like it."**
** D'Souza thinks Monty Python is sophomoric. And not in a good way.

"Can Atheists Be Parents?"

2008-01-07T22:35:00.000-08:00

Did you see this article in Time magazine recently? Very chilling. An atheist couple in New Jersey adopted a baby though an agency, brought her home, and expected the required final approval from a judge to be a formality. Not so:

In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes' right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes' "high moral and ethical standards," he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that "no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience." Despite [the baby's] tender years, he continued, "the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being."

The Burkes were ordered to send the child back to the adoption agency. The case is headed for the New Jersey Supreme Court.

I'm on tenterhooks.

Thanks to Mittal for the link.

[Update 2008-02-15: Darren has pointed out that this story is, um, 37 years old...just like me!! You'd think I'd be old enough to check the date of an article before mindlessly passing it on, wouldn't you? Oops!]

Pills

2008-01-07T22:29:00.000-08:00

Here's a puzzle that my friend Kevin sent me.*

You have five jars of pills. All the pills in one jar only are contaminated. The only way to tell which pills are contaminated is by weight. "Good" pills weigh 10 grams while "bad" (contaminated) ones weigh 9 grams. You are given a scale and can make just one measurement with it. How can you tell which jar holds the contaminated pills?

Here's the answer to a follow-up question I had; it may help you:

Q: Is the scale a balance scale?
A: No; it's a regular kitchen scale that tells you how many grams something weighs.

* Kudos to Mark for solving this in about 30 seconds.

Unexpectable Know-Where-It-Goes

2007-12-11T20:55:00.000-08:00

My daughter received a cute toy from her dentist the other day. It's a bouncy ball, all covered with knobby bits. Which means that its bounces are unpredictable - it careens around the room in a most unexpected manner.

Guess what my son calls it, lacking a ready-made term for it?

Unexpectable Know-Where-It-Goes.

No one could do better.

Dinner table debate

2007-12-10T20:09:00.001-08:00

Oh and how I love Stephen Fry. He's been blogging lately, which is a treat. Blessays, he calls them; you can access them from this site: http://stephenfry.com/blog/

In a recent blessay, "Getting Overheated," Fry writes of a dinner party at which he got into a debate with an American about global warming. It's well worth reading, mainly for some very good points he makes about intelligent argument and his reasons for taking action even in the absence of utter certainty. And he says some amusing things about Terry Pratchett fans that I managed not to take personally. Read it, do.

What struck me first in this article, though, is an observation Fry makes about the difference between the average Brit and the average American 'round the average dinner table (and this has nothing to do with whether the milk or the tea goes in first*):

I like to think I’m never vituperative or too ad hominem but I do know that I fall on ideas as hungry wolves fall on strayed lambs and the result isn’t always pretty. This is especially dangerous in America.... Americans are not raised in a tradition of debate and that the adversarial ferocity common around a dinner table in Britain is more or less unheard of in America. ... To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle.... Americans really don’t seem to be very good at or very used to the idea of a good no-holds barred verbal scrap. I’m not talking about inter-family ‘discussions’ here, I don’t doubt that within American families and amongst close friends, all kinds of liveliness and hoo-hah is possible, I’m talking about what for good or ill one might as well call dinner-party conversation. Disagreement and energetic debate appears to leave a loud smell in the air.

Is this so? Americans unused to debate? Adversarial ferocity? Verbal scraps? This is not my experience, but I experience Americans as a Canadian, not as a Brit. Anyone else care to weigh in?

* Milk first is, my dear, non-U. And I can even tell you why: Poor quality tea cups could crack when filled with boiling water straight from the kettle as Orwell recommends. If it's, "Milk in first, Dinah, and save the crockery," then we know a thing or two about the quality of your tea service. The finest bone china requires no such manoeuvrings.

Riddle

2007-12-10T19:59:00.000-08:00

What comes once in a minute, twice in a moment, but never in a thousand years?

(Sorry for the long absence, my loves.)

Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Zoot!

2007-10-17T20:52:00.000-07:00

Well, I was saving this for Zoot's birthday. But that's too long to wait. Here you are then, Zoot; you were not the first Zoot I knew. This is a gem of an excerpt from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). With love, Dingo.

GALAHAD: Zoot!

DINGO: No, I am Zoot's identical twin sister, Dingo.

GALAHAD: Oh, well, excuse me, I--

DINGO: Where are you going?

GALAHAD: I seek the Grail! I have seen it, here in this castle!

DINGO: No! Oh, no! Bad, bad Zoot!

GALAHAD: What is it?

DINGO: Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Zoot! She has been setting a light to our beacon, which, I just remembered, is grail-shaped. It's not the first time we've had this problem.

GALAHAD: It's not the real Grail?

DINGO: Oh, wicked, bad, naughty, evil Zoot! Oh, she is a naughty person, and she must pay the penalty -- and here in Castle Anthrax, we have but one punishment for setting alight the grail-shaped beacon. You must tie her down on a bed and spank her!

GIRLS: A spanking! A spanking!

DINGO: You must spank her well. And after you have spanked her, you may deal with her as you like. And then, spank me.

Hall

2007-09-21T00:21:00.000-07:00

I came across The Hall of Documentation Weirdness again recently, a great site by a Vancouver writer called Darren Barefoot. It features unintentionally hilarious technical illustrations from around the world, made all the more humorous by Barefoot's quizzical captions.

The site has been around for a few years now, and it's as good as ever, although I notice that it now includes some ads. (I remember its popularity spiked back in 2002 or 2003 when it got slashdotted: Barefoot was probably inundated with offers that he could not refuse.)

Anyway, it's wonderful; you must check it out. Here's a teaser:

"From a Dell computer box. I believe the caption should read 'If you drop this box on a dog, don't trip over its tail'."

Minimalism

2007-09-20T23:45:00.000-07:00

I attended a seminar on somefink called "minimalism" recently. Naturally, what this is depends entirely on the context. If I were an art historian, you might think I was talking of Stella or Serra. If I were an architect, you might think I was talking of Mies van der Rohe.

But I am a technical writer. (Now, stay awake. I'm not finished yet. You don't want me to tip Tilted Arc [1981] over on you, now do you? It's heavy.) Talk of minimalism in technical writing circles always comes 'round to JoAnn Hackos, technical communications superstar. Yes, we have them too. Superstars, that is. You haven't heard of them, but they're out there. And Hackos is their Queen.

The seminar was unbelievable!

Here are the highlights:
- We write too much; no one reads it. (This manual..., In this chapter..., This document assumes..., Before you begin..., Introduction..., Getting to Know the Product Features..., Navigating the User Interface..., Document Conventions..., Related Publications..., Overview of...Using the Such and Such Feature....) Yawn, yawn, yawn. All a waste of time and space.
- We don't provide what people want. (Just tell me how to increase the volume of my cell phone! Just tell me how to increase the volume on my cell phone! Just tell me how to increase the volume on my cell phone!)

We meticulously document every software feature, yet we're still somehow missing the point.

Why? Because we don't understand what customers are actually trying to do with the product. It's actually easier to write from spec, from talking to engineers, and from looking at the user interface than it is to talk to users. So that's what most of us do. But it won't do. It won't do.

I was pretty inspired to do things differently. Stay tuned. I hope I'll have more to tell you soon.

GodTube

2007-09-19T19:54:00.000-07:00

Remember when I got all excited about the iBelieve?

Well, the Christian techies are at it again. Check this out: GodTube ("Broadcast Him"), a video social networking site that sounds like a cross between YouTube and Facebook.

It's described here as "The fastest growing Internet site in the US" with a growth rate of 973 percent in the single month since its launch. The same article tells us this about the site:

One of the hottest and "most viewed" videos on the site's home page is called "Rapture – End of Times". It depicts recent world events as a prelude to the second coming of Jesus Christ at which time only the faithful will accompany the saviour to heaven (in the video they disappear into thin air during an Adobe Flash of lightning*) leaving the sinners and non-believers behind in a hell on earth of their own making.

* LOVE that: Adobe Flash of lightening. Why can't I think up these gems?

Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates

2007-09-19T12:15:00.000-07:00

Spotted off the starboard bow of Language Log. Did you know that today is Talk Like a Pirate Day?

I looked up avast, by the way. According to Merriam-Webster, this is "a nautical command to stop or cease." Sort of like the seafarin' version of ESC.

What do you get when you cut an earthworm in half?

2007-09-17T21:17:00.000-07:00

Did YOU think the answer was "two earthworms"?

Sadly, no.

Turns out that the lengthy Death Spasm of the earthworm outlasts the attention span of small children.

SLICE!

You: "Hey! Two earthworms. Cool!"

You: "Hey! Dirt! Cool!"
You: "Hey! Isn't that Jacques Cousteau?! Cool!"
You: "Hey! Ice cream! Cool!"

ZOOM!

Earthworm:

Fact courtesy of Q.I.
Q.I. courtesy of Richard.
Jacques Cousteau distraction courtesy of Scott.

Don't Forget the Chicks This Time

2007-09-11T20:43:00.000-07:00

I am thinking of getting my boss this t-shirt for Christmas. She will LOVE it. Shhh... it's a secret.

Available in assorted sizes from the fine fellow who brings us Dinosaur Comics.

Rigourizing

2007-09-07T21:33:00.000-07:00

A friend forwarded me an e-mail message from the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy about their Masters of Science in Animals and Public Policy program*. He had a feeling that one of the words in the message would raise my eyebrows a fraction. He was right. Here it is:

"You might like to know that we have completed a second year of rigourizing** our curriculum."

Rigourizing?

I have nothing against made-up words. All words, after all, are made up by someone at one time or another. This, however, is a particular type of made-up word that bothers me: it does not improve the sentence.

It's pretty clear that rigourize is inspired by the adjective rigourous. According to m-w.com, rigourous means manifesting, exercising, or favoring rigor: very strict. Tufts is making this program more rigourous; I can see that, but only after stopping at this new word, doing a quick translation, and returning to read the rest of the sentence.

In this case, the new construction murkifies the sentence, blockifying my comprehension. Instead, I would suggest:

"You might like to know that we have spent two years making our curriculum more rigourous."

And I do! I do like to know!

* Which sounds simply spanking! Here's an enticing description of the program (from the same e-mail message):

Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy pursues research on the changing place of animals in society. Our Master of Science in Animals and Public Policy (MAPP) is an interdisciplinary degree in human-animal studies and public policy.

Human-animal studies is kin to environmental studies with a focus on wild or domestic animals in relation to nature and society. Our program is interdisciplinary with a curriculum that balances theory, methods, topics and research. We welcome students from the natural and social sciences, as well as the arts and humanities. We also give due attention to both qualitative and quantitative modes of research.

**His word absent from the dictionary or not, our Tufts author is not utterly alone: rigourize gets 7 hits in a Google search; rigorize, 1,150. Looks like the Americans are more likely to use it. Our author, I'm guessing from the ou spelling, is likely a Brit or Canadian living in the US, but I'll wager he's been there awhile.

More Pundles

2007-09-05T22:12:00.000-07:00

Here are some more pundles*; good luck!

1.

o er t o

faredce

k k

c c

u u

t t

s s

word word word word

* Acnowledgements to http://www.billsgames.com/. No peeking though. You know I hate that.

Customs and Immigration

2007-08-22T20:21:00.000-07:00

I'm in California at the moment (lunch, Mr. Kite? Monday or Tuesday?). My husband and my two little kids are here too. They decided to come along to keep me company because I am here for a full week. We are lucky to be here. Let me tell you about the nasty thing that happened to me at the Vancouver International Airport.

If you're travelling to the US from Vancouver, you clear (if all goes well) Customs and Immigration in Vancouver. I've never had any problem crossing... until yesterday.

I got a bad feeling from the officer right from the moment we were directed into his queue. He took his time before he looked up from the glow of his computer screen to acknowledge us. I won't say greet us because, um, that didn't happen. (Despite the pure fiction they have displayed on posters in the Customs Zone at the airport: We pledge to greet you with courtesy and welcome you to the United States. Ha! More like, We pledge to get erections while we give you the silent treatment until you start to babble and cry.) Anyway, he asked some questions, and then slowly and deliberately reached for an upsettingly non-handy fat purple felt pen.* I could tell this wasn't his regular pen. He wrote a big letter "H" on my customs card. "H"?? I've never seem that before. What could I have said to give me the worrisome H?

Then he said, "Go in there." And pointed to a set of closed doors. Not a good sign. (Did I mention that it is 4:30 am?) I said, "Is there a problem?" He said, "I don't know."

To make a long story short, we had a long wait in the second room. The clock was ticking (as clocks do), and I was starting to get nervous about missing my flight (the fam was on a later flight so I wasn't as worried about them). Finally, I had some more questions from a slightly nicer person and found out that I am violating NAFTA rules by coming down here to do work. The only reason they finally let me through was because I swore up and down that I was only coming here for training and that I wouldn't do a stitch of work (so help me god). The fact that I work for the same company in Vancouver as the one that I am visiting in the US? Makes no difference. The fact that I am doing the same work in Vancouver as I would do in the US? Makes no difference.

Good to know. Wish my company had given me a heads up (does this take an apostrophe? I've often wondered. I will look it up someday).

They added an annotation to my passport record. I expect that border crossing will get harder from now on.

I ran and made my flight with 2 minutes to spare. I am not in very good cardiovascular shape.

But here we are. We're having a pretty good time.

* Yes, I need that many adjectives.

Susan

2007-08-16T21:47:00.001-07:00

My favorite books from my childhood are those in C.S. Lewis's Narnia series. In particular, I love The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Naturally, when I was a little mite, I didn't pick up on the Christian symbolism. Now that I am a Big Fat Atheist, I notice it all right, but don't give a hoot. Actually, that's not quite true: if anything, I rather enjoy it. I suppose it's because the books were already special to me.

More of a problem for me is the fact the Susan doesn't get to come back to Narnia at the end of the series. Why not? This is especially hard for a child reader to understand. A child reader wants the whole family together: the thought of an excluded one is hard to accept.

I can tell, even from the very first book that she appears in (T.L.t.W.a.t.W.), that Susan is not Lewis's favored child. She doesn't want to give in to the magical world. In Prince Caspian she is the last to see Aslan and is responsible for leading the children astray while they are on their way to join the battle. In The Last Battle, Susan does not appear and is described by one of the children who returns as "...no longer a friend of Narnia." But why? Is it because she is too cautious and sensible to believe (to have faith?) or is it because (as some critics think) she is becoming a sexual being, more concerned with her own beauty?

And what of Aslan's words in T.L.t.W.a.t.W.: "Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia"? How are we to reconcile these things? Perhaps Susan just has to wait for her turn. Maybe she has a thing or two to learn first.

Neil Gaiman (most awesome modern fantasy writer) wrote a short story a few years ago called "The Problem of Susan." (It appears in his recent collection, Fragile Things.) This story features an elderly Professor Hastings, who is Susan Pevensie in her dotage. Worth a read. Gives quite a different perspective. Don't read aloud to children.

Water and Wine

2007-08-14T22:14:00.000-07:00

I'll admit that the puzzles that appear here are easy for me to pull together for your enjoyment: I don't make them up. They're the lazy girl's blog post. The low-hanging fruit. You'll see more of them when I'm busy. When I don't have time to do a proper post about (a) what I'm reading*, (b) atheism, (c) language, or (d) funny stuff, I'll give you a puzzle to hold your interest. I want you to stay with me!

So, without further ado:

You have a glass of water and a glass of wine. Both glasses contain the same volume of their respective liquids. Take a teaspoon of the water and add it to the wine, then take a teaspoon of the wine and add it to the water.

Question: Is there now more water in the wine glass or vice-versa? Can you give a simple explanation for your answer?

* Harry Potter book 7, I'm afraid. All of creation is reading this at present. My cousin told me of a recent spoken word performance she attended: the performer simply took a seat, paged to the end of the latest Harry Potter, and read the last 4 pages aloud. He was booed.

Explain this sequence

2007-08-06T00:05:00.000-07:00

Explain why this sequence is ordered as it is:

8 5 4 9 1 7 6 3 2 0

T-Rex is damn sexy!

2007-08-04T01:14:00.000-07:00

Surely you agree! Enjoy more of his awesome exploits at qwantz.com.

Wev

2007-08-03T23:59:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to this post, I feel I should alert you to the existence of the term wev.**

This, apparently, is a short form of whatever, come to us through the intermediate stops of whatev and whatevs. Yeah, it sux having to text words of eight or more letters...unless they are strings (can't really call them "words") like omfgrofl or kthxbye: eight little letters doing the work of many, many more.

I don't like wev—not because it's abbreviated, mind you (I luv abbrvs! Abbrvs rck! UR N MY BRAIN, TOXOPLASMOSING MY GRMMR***)—for all the same reasons I don't like whatever, but I suppose it has a breezy newness to it. At least, it does for me; at least, it does so far.

**Yes, yes, this is also from Language Log.

***I didn't make this up. I don't know who did. I wish it were me.

Democrats are finding God

2007-07-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

I'll just say it: they're finding God to get votes. I don't believe for a minute that Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are devout. Heck, I can barely bring myself to accept that they're theists. Someone has been advising them that an avowal of faith would be a smart tactic.

Is this a bad move? I know what R. Dawkins would say (dear R. Dawkins is bursting a gasket), but I'm not sure. Here's an excerpt from the July 12 Time magazine cover story, "How the Democrats Got Religion":

The most conservative white Protestants, [John C. Green] says, are all but off-limits to the Democrats. But then there are more than 22 million voters he calls "freestyle Evangelicals," worried about not only their eternal souls but also their kids' schools, their car's fuel efficiency and the crisis in Darfur. In the past, those voters may have leaned Republican in part because the G.O.P. has been far smarter about presenting itself as friendly to people of faith while painting the Democrats as a bunch of sneering, secular coastal élites.

But the Republican lock on Evangelicals may be breaking. The percentage of white Evangelicals who self-identify as Republicans has declined from roughly 50% in 2004 to about 44% this past February, according to Green. Now the number is closer to 40% as more Evangelicals choose to label themselves independents. "There is a loosening of the Republican coalition, particularly among people under 30," Green says, "but it is not yet a movement toward the Democrats. It is a small but real change."

One does what one must do, I suppose. It's clearly a tactical move. But I can't help but wonder whether any mainstream American presidential candidate would have the courage to unflinchingly claim to be an atheist in 2007.*

* I don't know about Nader. Google** brings me back atheist, agnostic, humanist, and secular when I search Nader+religion; I'm not sure what Nader himself officially claims. And Nader doesn't count as mainstream, now, does he? And he's not a candidate this time, at least not so far.

**Wow: Google does reveal that Nader is simply dripping with Cisco Systems stock. Interesting, at least to me. But wildly irrelevant to this post.

Steel belt around a sphere

2007-07-23T21:35:00.000-07:00

Because you are such quick and clever puzzle-solvers, I'm going to raise the (ahem) belt a bit. This one is hard. Acknowledgements to Martin Gardner.

Imagine that you are standing on a perfectly smooth sphere that is as large as the Earth (in circumference). A steel belt is wrapped snugly around one of the equators of the sphere.

Now, a length of steel, one meter long, is added to the belt (the belt is "opened", the new segment added, the belt fastened again). The segment adds to the length of the belt sufficiently to raise the belt off the surface of the sphere by the same distance all the way around. Will this segment lift the belt high enough so that you can:
- Slip a playing card under it?
- Slip your hand under it?
- Slip a baseball under it?

For bonus points:
- Is your answer different if the sphere is the size of the sun?

For extra do-decko bonus points:

- Explain your answer.

Enduring Love

2007-07-19T22:18:00.000-07:00

Have you read Enduring Love by Ian McEwan? No? Well, do.

I've read it before and am reading it again now for book club purposes. (Yeah, book club! There's hope for you yet!) I wish I hadn't let so many intervening years (6 or 7) go by since I last read this book.

Here's what I love:

- The entire opening chapter. There is nothing to equal it. It stands alone beautifully. In fact, I do believe, although I couldn't swear to it (the front matter of my edition makes no mention of it), that this chapter was originally published as a short story and that is how I first encountered it. A picnic, a yell, five men running toward each other across a field, disorder, tragedy, guilt, the beginning of obsession. I don't want to tell you any more: just read it yourself and then let me know what you think.

- The writing is exquisite. Here's an example; the narrator is describing his experience of recounting the story of the tragedy to friends:

I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the good-willed imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided the experience from its representation by anecdote. Over the days and weeks, Clarissa and I told our story many times to friends, colleagues, and relative. I found myself using the same phrases, the same adjectives in the same order. It became possible to recount the events without re-living them in the faintest degree, without even remembering them.* (p. 36)**

- The philosophical questions: What are our moral obligations to our fellow humans; are they different for relations than for strangers; how do we balance self-interest and altruism? What is the biological basis for altruism? How does game theory impact our decisions?

- The science vs. religion threads that appear throughout the story. Rationality vs. irrationality.

- The discussion of love. The parallel discussion of obsession.

* This exactly how I feel when telling a friend a story about something that happened to me. If I have a 1 hour delay in the airport, it pisses me off a certain amount. Let x be that amount. I tell you about it... now, you may like me, but you're not me, so although you sympathize, my feelings of x will elicit something less than x in you. 1/2 x, let's say, if I am lucky. OK, so when I tell you about my experience, I am trying to do more than give you the bare facts. I want to communicate how the experience made me feel. So, without meaning to lie, really, my 1 hour wait at the airport somehow becomes a 2 hour wait at the airport in the retelling. And now you, bless you, feel x too. Thank you.

** Vintage Edition, 1998.

On Holiday

2007-07-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

Not much will happen here for 10 days or so. But rest assured that I will be having a great time playing on the beach, looking for sand dollars, getting my toenails painted**, eating great food, soaking up the sun, singing campfire songs... my husband is practising his guitar as we speak. He's working his way through the set list. I'll ask for Dragostea din tei. Charles will ask for The Battle of New Orleans. (He's American; where you see British in this cheerful little ditty, replace it with Canadian...

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin. There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.We fired once more and they began to runnin' ... down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

OK, it was a long time ago. We'll all sing along and shoot the British for an evening.)

Michele will ask for Radiohead's Pearly. Angela will ask for Fix You by Coldplay. The kids will ask for Baby Beluga (or maybe not, they are getting older) and Lollipop (Mika). Bob and Derek will ask for Pink Floyd (Owen can only play Comfortably Numb, so we'll hear that a couple of times). Strangers on the beach sometimes shout out requests. Things like, "TOM PETTY!!" and "SHUT UP!!" Yes, it will be lovely.

I'll see you in a bit. Be good.

**I know the toenails don't really fit in with all that beach stuff. But there is a spa right by the beach resort! Woo-hoo!

Two Trains and a Fly

2007-07-03T20:22:00.000-07:00

I hope this doesn't remind you too much of the problems you had to work out in Grade 7. This one is a little different.

Two train engines are facing each other on a single track, two hundred miles apart. Simultaneously, they begin to move towards each other at 50 miles per hour (assume they don't have to take any time to get up to speed). Predictably, they crash.

At the outset, a little fly is sitting on the front of one of the engines. When the engines begin to move, the fly immediately takes off and flies towards the other engine. When it reaches the other engine, it turns around and returns to the first engine and so on, back and forth, to and fro, until the fly is crushed in the impact. (Tears.) Before the crushing, the fly flies at 75 miles per hour.

Question: How far does the fly fly before the impact?

PS: Puzzle is from What is the Name of This Book, by Raymond Smullyan (Prentice-Hall, 1978).

Sabbath Mode

2007-06-30T23:19:00.000-07:00

My new KitchenAid electric range (Architect Series II) arrived today. As soon as it was plugged in and its gleaming surfaces admired, I curled up with the Use and Care Guide (wouldn't you? You wouldn't?? Well.).

It has more special functions than I know what to do with:
1. Fahrenheit and Celsius conversion
2. Tones On/Off
3. Tones High/Low
4. Cooking Time Completions Tones On/Off
5. Dehydrate
6. Oven temperature calibration
7. Sabbath Mode

As I read this list, a few thoughts flit across my mind:
- The copy editor wasn't checking for consistent casing.
- Can you download personalized tones for the Cooking Time Completion?
- Dehydrate? Awesome!
- Oven temperature calibration is definitely more control than I need.
And finally:
- Sabbath Mode? "Sabbath Mode" as in A MODE FOR THE SABBATH?

Yes, that's right. A mode for The Sabbath. With this mode, Mode 7 (how appropriate), you can program the oven on Friday afternoon so that it will cook the food at the right time and at the right temperature on Saturday. You don't have to do a stitch of work. I presume that opening the door to get the food out of the oven and bringing it to the table doesn't count.

And I haven't even told you the really interesting part. Are you ready? To quote from the Use and Care Guide (p. 18), emphasis added:

The oven temperature can be changed when the oven(s) [(s)?] are in the Sabbath Mode. No tones will sound, and the display will not change.

You know what this means, right? If, on The Sabbath, you wander over to see how the meal is cooking (by itself), and you think, "Fuck! I accidentally programmed it to cook at 500 degrees—that's 200 fucking degrees too high!!" well, there's a surreptitious way out of this little pickle for you. You can quietly adjust the temperature and No One Will Ever Know.**

**No one except God, that is.

PS: Zoot's staying over... I blame her for my bad language.

Big Words

2007-06-25T20:58:00.001-07:00

Conrad Black. I shall tell you what I know about him; I shall not Google him first. Here we go:

Not much.

I know that he's a Canadian publishing magnet. (Some of you may even say magnate. Fussy.) I know that he's married to Barbara Amiel, stylish right-wing columnist. I know that he is an English Lord (Canadian birthplace be damned). I know that he is (was? former?) CEO of Hollinger. I know that he's in trouble related to some alleged financial jiggery-pokery. He's presently on trial, in fact.

Do I like him? Do I dislike him? Well, up until one week ago, I was completely neutral. I was Sweden. I was beige. I was pH 7 on the subject of Conrad Black. I was 21 degrees Celsius. I would have been an excellent juror.

I don't know a lot about his alleged crimes and what I do know doesn't worry me much. I can't pretend to be interested; the news of his trial is, to me, soporific.

I did read something last week, however, that moved me off my neutral stance. I've become... if not Sweden, then Denmark, perhaps. Pink. pH 8. Nearly 22 degrees C. Not a lot of movement, you'll notice, but something.

It was this delightful article by Ian Brown, which appeared in the June 16th edition of the The Globe and Mail. It's called "Vocabulary: Are we losing our lexicon?" and it's well worth reading in full.

Brown opens by stating that Black's lawyer (Brown and Black! That's funny!), Edward Greenspan, won't let Black take the stand. And it's for quite an interesting reason:

The problem is Mr. Black's fondness for whacking big words: tricoteuses (knitters of yarn, used to describe reporters and gossips, augmented by the adjective "braying"), planturous (fleshy), poltroon (a coward, a.k.a. former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa), spavined (lame), dubiety (doubt: Mr. Black rarely uses a simple word where a splashy lemma will do), gasconading (blustering) and velleities (distant hopes), to list just a few of his verbal smatterings. Mr. Greenspan fears the Lord's lingualism will turn off the jury.

I like Conrad (may I call you Conrad?) for this. It's reason enough, isn't it? It's odd that Greenspan is concerned Conrad will "turn off" the jury. I bet they'd love it.

Crossing a Bridge

2007-06-22T13:34:00.000-07:00

Four men need to cross a bridge at night:
- No more than two can cross at a time
- They need a flashlight to cross, and they have only one
- They all start on the west side and all need to end up on the east side
- They take 10, 5, 2, and 1 minutes to cross, respectively

What's the most efficient way for them to cross?

And to add a note of suspense: a madman turns up after 18 minutes to kill anyone left on the west side or still on the bridge (i.e., 19 minutes is not the correct answer!).

Thanks go to Darren—this tricky one is from him.

Steig and Peet

2007-06-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

I have been enjoying two fabulous children's authors: William Steig and Bill Peet. They have a lot in common, it turns out.

Both were American. They were contemporaries: Steig was born in 1907 and died in 2003 (aged 95); Peet was born in 1915 and died in 2002 (aged 87). Both charmingly illustrated their own stories*. Both had interesting careers outside of their work as authors: Steig was a cartoonist for The New Yorker; Peet wrote for Disney.

Both wrote stories about innocent child or animal protagonists battling the odds to achieve something. Steig's characters outsmart evil captors, break free from enchantments, and face storms to find their way home for a happy reunion with loved ones. Peet's stories frequently contain an environmental message. In one story, a little bird flies from New York City to California to live in a redwood tree. In another, a group of animals hop a train to try to find a new home after their habitat is destroyed.

Gripping stories, sweet pictures, engaging characters... yes, yes, yes. But what I am enjoying the most at the moment is the rich vocabulary in these books. They are for quite young children, really, but neither Steig nor Peet shies away from big or uncommon words. Here's what I've found in a quick flip-through of the ones that happen to be lying about:
- Steig: perplexed, ceased, compote, exclamations, defecate**
- Peet: chortled***, blunder, diminishing, bedraggled, sycamore, indestructible

I read aloud to my kids every night. And I've had enough of Go Dog Go, Green Eggs and Ham****, and Are You My Mother? I love books like this instead: books that engage me as much as they engage the kids. My kids prefer them too.

* With a few exceptions; for instance, Steig's later work was illustrated by others. Hard to draw when you're, like, 92.

**Seriously!

*** Peet loves this word! I've seen him use it in at least three different stories.

****Am I the only one out there who is not a fan of Dr. Seuss's illustrations? Creepy. Why are they all smiling with their eyes closed? And all those floppy feet...

Default position

2007-06-20T21:24:00.000-07:00

Recently—since I've started getting all outspoken and all—I've had people ask me the difference between atheism and a religion. I was silenced (briefly) by the question—not because I thought it was a silly one, not at all. I was silenced (briefly) because although it is clear to me that there is an enormous difference, I didn't have a good answer all ready. I've been thinking about it over the last couple of weeks, when... guess what? I found that someone has expressed it beautifully for me. So here you are then; a marvellous quote from Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation:

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, atheist is a term that should not ever exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to 'never doubt the existence of God' should be obliged to present evidence for his existence—and, indeed, for his BENEVOLENCE, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day.

And, for good measure, here's a nice succinct quote from a fellow called Don Hirschberg (I have to confess I hadn't heard of him before today, but I like his analogy): "Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."

What does this all mean? Well, it means that we should think of atheism as a default position—like disbelief in astrology or alchemy—that we ought to hold until we are presented with sufficient evidence to switch.

Four men in hats

2007-06-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

Here's a fantastic puzzle that I found here (no peeking).**

Imagine four men buried up to their necks in the ground, as shown in the illustration. Between A and B is a solid brick wall. The men can only look forward, so A and B can see only the brick wall, C can see only B, and D can see both B and C.

The men know that among them are four hats: two black and two white. None of the men knows the colour of the hat on his own head.

To avoid being shot (I l-o-o-ove puzzles that include that phrase), any one of the men must correctly call out the colour of his own hat. If he gets it wrong, all four men will be shot. The men are not allowed to talk to each other and have 10 minutes to think.

After one minute, one of them calls out the correct colour of his own hat, thereby saving them all. I'd like to think that what happens next is that they are immediately dug up, relieved of their triangular hats, and taken to a Radiohead concert as a reward.

Questions for you:
1. Who calls out?
2. How does he know?

** I pinched the illustration from that site too.

Sir Salman

2007-06-19T17:56:00.000-07:00

Salman Rushdie became Sir Salman last week: on June 15, 2007, he was knighted by the Queen.**

Here are some quotes, running the gambit from frightening, through appropriate, to fluffy.

A Pakistani government minister sees this as justification for suicide attacks: "If someone exploded a bomb on [Rushdie's] body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title." (The Guardian, June 18).

The Guardian sees this as a "...belated endorsement by the British establishment."

My favorite is one that Bill Poser found and mentioned on LL; he doesn't identify the original author: "The queen is a piece I recognize, and so is the knight, but what, scacchically, is a "rushdie" and how does it move on the board?"

(Scacchically, Poser tells us, is an adverb that means "from the point of view of chess." This obscure word is recorded in the OED*** as dating back to 1860—thanks to Language Hat for looking it up for us.)

** On the same day, the founders of an erotic lingerie line received MBEs.

***The OED may approve, but my spellchecker frowns.

[Update, 2007-06-20: Seriously now. Predictably, things have worsened. An Iranian government official calls the knighthood "a provocative act," and Pakistan has asked Britian to rescind the honour.

This takes me right back to 1989. Coincidentally, I happen to be reading God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, and in Chapter 2, "Religion Kills," he reminds us of some of the public statements made by religious organizations when the fatwa against Rushdie was first issued. Rather than the universal outrage that one might have expected, Hitchens reminds us that the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief sephardic rabbi in Israel agreed in official public statements that, while the threat of violence was a pity, The Satanic Verses was indeed blasphemous. Other public figures agreed. If you haven't yet read the famous exchange of letters between Rushdie, John Le Carre, and Hitchens that appeared in The Guardian in November 1997, now is the time to remedy that.]

Kid Birthdays

2007-06-18T01:00:00.000-07:00

I have a confession. I make it with some hesitation. In my circle of friends, this is like saying "Recycling is stupid!*" or "Omg, like, too bad Stephen Harper is already married!" It's like saying that one loves watching Fear Factor or Blind Date**. It's like installing one of those TOTALLY offensive noisy huge above-ground grass-killing backyard pools (not to be confused with those dear little wading ones that you can fill up with cold water from the garden hose)***.

Here it is: I adore goodie-bags from little kids' birthday parties. I like putting them together and handing them out; I like receiving them (well, I don't receive them, more's the pity, but I do look forward to the moment when we're all in the car on the way home and my kids tell me what they find in the ones they've been given). Yeah, yeah, plastic crap. Yeah, yeah, too much sugar. Yeah, yeah, waste of money. I know what you're thinking; I hear what you're saying. But I like them anyway.

My kids both have birthdays in the spring. This year, we did quite different things for each. For my daughter, we booked a party at... well, I don't think I want to give you the actual name of the venue because I don't want to do it any Google-harm. But I can tell you, small circle that you are, I don't mind you knowing. It was at that large, silver, Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic dome in Vancouver that was built for Expo '86. That should narrow it down sufficiently for you. I love the place, actually, which is why we picked it for the birthday party in the first place. Big Mistake.

Here's what I didn't like:
1. We thought we were getting a decorated party room. The web site assured us we didn't need to worry about our own decorations (unless we wanted "extra".... I guess that was a cue to probe further).

What we got: a cold room with one drooping "happy birthday" banner (lowercase intentional, if not strictly accurate) that had obviously been up for awhile. Two plain brown tables shoved together with no attention to alignment. Stacked chairs.

2. We thought we were getting our own Science Leader, a dynamic person who was to show the kids some age-appropriate science experiments.

What we got: a distracted teenager arrived 15 minutes late, wheeling in a Van de Graaf generator. At that point, I was quite pleased to see him and optimistic about the hour's worth of experiments that we should still have time for. However, after few rounds with the generator (four or five kids got to come up, touch the thing, and have their hair stand up), our leader left to "check on lunch." After lunch (see item 3 below), which was delivered by someone else, there was still no sign of him. I went looking and found him eating his own lunch. I asked if there would be any more experiments. He bounced up. "Sure!" he said, as if this was quite a good idea of mine and he'd be happy to oblige (!!!!). Back in he came and... plugged in the Van de Graaf generator again! I couldn't believe it! I was beginning to view this old dented silver thing much the way a circus visitor, who is wondering where all the lions and tigers are, views a depressed motheaten old goat as it is lead around the ring a few times for the crowd's entertainment. And that was IT! That was it for the "science experiments"!

3. We thought we'd have a decent lunch.

What we got: Utter failure. I take a good portion of the responsibility here because I should have known that pre-made sandwiches are a risky choice for a group of 5- to 7-year-olds. Of course there will be ones who don't like the lettuce or tomatoes. There will be ones who don't like tuna. Yeah... there's a reason that hot dogs are the birthday food of choice. But that big science dome and the BC chain restaurant that has a presence there have to take responsibility for the lack of freshness—even I couldn't choke down one of those sandwiches, and there were a lot of leftovers to deal with. Old lettuce. Can't bear it. (The lemon meringue pie went over very well! We brought that.)

4. We thought we'd have a great time knocking about the place, checking out the exhibits, after the official "hosted" part of the party was over.

What we got: The most terrifying 5 minutes of my life. This is another thing that I take responsibility for. I should have realized that getting 12 5- to 7-year-olds from a party room downstairs to the exhibits upstairs requires more than two adults. We made it, finally, after the longest 5 minutes that I've ever experienced. We got all the kids into one smallish exhibit room and then my husband and I sat outside its entrance to make sure no one left. We spent the entire time counting and re-counting kids until their parents started to arrive for the pick-up. Comparing numbers. Checking lists. Counting again. Oh, the sweet relief when we could start to match up kids with their parents and cross responsibilities off our list.

Compare this with my son's birthday. We had it at home. We planned every detail ourselves: crafts, party games, and make-your-own-pizza. No tired old goats. No fear of losing anyone. No uneaten food. It was great! And a LOT cheaper. We could afford to do more with the goodie bags.

* I shamefacedly admit to being half-hearted about cleaning out the cat food tins.
** Never!!!!!
***Ever!!!!!

The Monty Hall Problem

2007-06-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

This is a very famous puzzle; you may have come across it before. I absolutely love it. I love it because it is counter-intuitive (clue) and controversial to the point of emotional debate** (clue), and yet the problem is easy to describe and the solution is reasonably simple to explain.

Don't get me wrong: complex math does some serious work behind the scenes (so they tell me; I'll take their word for it), but you don't need to be a mathematician to understand the solution...at least on a superficial level.

The Monty Hall Problem gets its name from the host of an old TV game show called Let's Make a Deal. In the show, Monty offers a contestant a choice among three closed doors. Behind one is a new car; behind each of the other two is... I forget. Something less desirable than a new car. Maybe a goat. Yeah, I think that's it: each of the other two doors conceals a goat. (I know I could Google this but I am doing my best to write it down from memory.)

After the contestant makes his or her choice, Monty opens one of the unselected doors to reveal a goat. The car is either behind the contestant's choice or the only other remaining closed door. Then Monty asks whether the contestant wants to switch doors or stick with the original choice.

Question: Should the contestant switch? Does it make a difference to the odds of winning?

What do you think?

** The letters to the editor in the magazine that published the solution to the problem, Parade, got quite heated.

Creation "Science" in Alberta

2007-06-12T21:40:00.000-07:00

Did you know that we have a shiny new creationism museum in Canada? It's called the Big Valley Creation [ahem] "Science" Museum (the derisive quotes and sarcastic throat clearing are mine all mine) and it's in Alberta. Apparently the owner was prepared for demonstrators to interfere the ribbon-cutting ceremonies, as they did when a similar museum opened in Kentucky, but no. Twenty people came to watch the event (I think the local bowling alley was having its lanes waxed so folks needed something to do), and they were polite. This is Canada, after all.

The Canadian media didn't bring this news to me—I found it on the Friendly Atheist's site.

P.S.: Ooh! Ooh! So excited! Bought the Hitchens book today! Will tell you how is soon.

Add a line, change a number

2007-06-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

I can't seem to stop it with the puzzles. I hope I am not driving the non-puzzlers among you mad.

Here is a number: VI

Can you add one line and turn it into a 7? That's easy!! VII

OK, smartie. Here is another number: IX

Can you add one line and turn it into a 6?

Fry and Laurie on Language

2007-06-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

Language Log posted this recently. Hi-lar-i-ous. Even funnier is that Fry and Laurie probably were around 30 at the time.

Another pundle

2007-06-08T22:02:00.000-07:00

You guys did pretty well with my last batch of pundles. Here is another one (hat tip to mr. kite; mr. kite knows a lot of good puzzles!):

Can beliefs be immoral?

2007-06-08T20:29:00.000-07:00

Does it matter what we believe? Is everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion? Or can beliefs be immoral? Some people think so.

W.K. Clifford, mathematician, says:

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.

and:

Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to.... But a greater and wider evil arises when the credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent.

T.H. Huxley, biologist and Darwin's Bulldog, says:

It is wrong for a man ["or woman," said in an Eric Idle voice] to say he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he ["or she"] can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.

Brand Blanchard, philosopher, says:

...that where great human goods and ills are involved, the distortion of belief from any sort of avoidable cause is immoral, and the more immoral, the greater the stakes.

The reason for the position of these thinkers is this: Our actions are guided by our beliefs. If our beliefs are mistaken, our actions may be immoral.

What do you think? Is it reasonable to apply the word immoral to a person's beliefs? Or must we reserve that term for actions? Or can we call a person's beliefs immoral only if their resulting actions are immoral? I don't know what I think.

(Acknowledgements to T. Schick Jr. and L. Vaughn for posing this question and collecting these quotations in their book How To Think About Weird Things.)

But sometimes I want to keep them

2007-06-07T20:18:00.000-07:00

Omit needless words. So say Strunk and White. And so do many others who write on writing. Be concise; be direct. These are the virtues.

God knows, it's a proud day for me when I can turn something like this:

To maintain synchronization between the two controller cards, the operating system occasionally performs an automatic reload of the standby controller card. To facilitate the automatic reload of an controller card, the auto-boot variable must be set to true.

Into something like this**:

To synchronize the controller cards, the operating system occasionally reloads the standby controller card automatically. Set the auto-boot variable to true to enable this process.

(I ran a word count on the before and after, I confess. Don't scream, but sometimes I'm tempted to include this type of data in my annual self-appraisal at work. So far I've refrained. I suspect that's been wise.)

Now I want to show you something else. Something wordy. Something that would cause any measure of the FOG index to choke. And yet something from which not a single word could be excised. It's from Stephen Fry's Paperweight; it's from a review Fry wrote of Bernard Levin's book, In These Times:

I have to confess right here and now that my feelings upon being called upon to review an anthology (and it is Levin himself who says that the volumes are collections of pressed flowers, and we all know that an anthology is, if it is to be taken au pied de la lettre, nothing more, nor indeed less—and who would have it otherwise?—that a posy or, mutandis mutandis, nosegay—though no doubt the gentlemen who busy themselves with instructing us how to live and speak would have words to say, nay, shriek, on the subject of how gay or otherwise the nose may, or, come to that, may not be, for as sure as eggs are graded ovular Euro-units there will lurk in some dank council cupboard a malevolent creature whose 'nosegay' is now proscribed, look with a spot I damn it—of flowers, and if you, having followed the wild and twisting path of my clauses to a successful conclusion, can sight, in the purple distance, the welcoming beacon that promises an end to this parenthesis, then Levin is the writer for you—five hours of reading Levin and the plain English sentence is only a dimly perceived memory, if I can just find my way out of this clause, I will join you....) are not unlike that of a schoolboy on being called upon to write a report on his schoolmaster.

That's 231 words, kids! In one sentence. I wouldn't omit a single one. But perhaps it all comes down to how one defines needless.

**Yes, this is what I do all day. I know some of you repair injured bodies, enlighten young minds, preserve our environment. Some of you create businesses, look after children, rescue animals. Some of you take care of the aged, drive our economy, define public policy. Some of you create music, create art, create dance. Some of you design buildings, write books, program computers. Some of you study the stars. Unclog drains. Breed mosquitoes.*** Police our streets. Search for a cure for cancer. Lead Expotitions to the North Pole.**** But I, I...well, I turn this (that nobody reads) into that (that nobody reads). But that's OK!

***Ha ha! Did you notice that this one isn't virtuous? I do know someone who does this. He does it with a surprising amount of enthusiasm.

****Who Am I Kidding? Obviously I am getting carried away. I have 6 readers that I know of. And none of you likes long cold hikes.

Masked Cards

2007-06-06T21:57:00.000-07:00

Here's a logic puzzle. I found it in Martin's book There Are Two Errors in the the Title of This Book, and he cites a 1968 experiment by Wason and Johnson-Laird.

You have four masked cards as shown in the image below. Which of the cards must you unmask in order to answer this question: Is it true that, in all cases, when there is a circle on the left there is a circle on the right?

Of course you can unmask all the cards and find out that way, but you don't need to unmask them all to be sure. Which cards must you unmask?

LOLCats and LOLCode

2007-06-06T20:54:00.000-07:00

Although I am an avid reader of a few blogs (see sidebar), I don't read many blogs. This means that when people talk about what is going on in the blogsphere*, I usually have no idea what they're talking about. I rely on the blogs I read to do the legwork and bring tattered fragments back to me. The biggest source of information for me in this area is Language Log, a blog that has an insane number of readers, many erudite posters, and a keen interest in how language is evolving in the, um, blogosphere.

It's thanks to LL that LOLCats and LOLCode have come to my attention. LOLCats are captioned cat photos; apparently they're all over the place. Did you know about this? I saw this comic from xkcd a couple of weeks ago, and I Totally Did Not Get It. I do now.

What interests LL posters about these cats is the grammar. Here's what Linguistic Mystic has to say:

Cats have bad grammar, and it’s funnier that way. In many of the pictures I found, I’ve noted pretty significant deviations from conventional English Grammar. Ranging from the incorrect application of language rules ("eated"), to internet style contractions ("plz" for "Please"), to out and out incorrect verb agreement ("I are serious cat"), many of these captions use blatantly bad grammar. The fact of the matter, though, is that the bad grammar somehow makes it funnier.

And now, we have LOLCode. Here's a canonical example from the lolcode site:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Four syntax elements in four lines:
- HAI and KTHXBYE are the start and stop block delimiters.
- CAN HAS is a feature request, like require or include.
- VISIBLE is a print statement.

I wonder if this will take off. Or if they'll develop an object-oriented version (cats and kittens!)

KTHXBYE

* Yep, I feel the same way when I say blogosphere as I do when I swear. Or say the word bling**.

**One of my more embarrassing moments lately was when I found myself explaining to a friend in a very UNCOOL WHITE LADY kind of way what bling is. My much cooler friend watched my pathetic writhing in mounting horror for a few minutes before she put me out of my misery. Told me I was a very sad loser and at least 8 years behind the times. And that I was a loser. A very behind-the-times sad one.

Fire on an island

2007-06-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

Test your survival instincts:

You're on an island that is completely covered with dry grass. A fire starts at one end and the wind is blowing it towards you, fast! The fire is too wide for you to go around it, and the coastline of the island is jagged cliffs—no sandy refuge for you, I'm afraid. What is a good strategy for you to avoid being burnt?

Rows of trees

2007-05-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a puzzle that had me stumped for awhile:

How do you plant 10 trees in 5 rows of 4?

Not just romance, but...

2007-05-30T20:53:00.001-07:00

Is this this article really telling me that Harlequin Publishing not only publishes romance novels, but that it also publishes African-American romance novels? What the hell?? We have plain old reg'lar romance and African-American romance? What am I supposed to conclude here?

Official God FAQ

2007-05-30T20:37:00.000-07:00

You've probably seen this. I know you cruise the Internet for just this kind of thing. In fact, I think at least three of you have sent it to me.

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, enjoy: http://www.400monkeys.com/God/

Locked boxes

2007-05-30T07:04:00.000-07:00

Here is a very good puzzle that I'd never heard before I came across it today. (I found it here—but don't peek yet!)

There are two locked boxes. Each box contains the other's one and only key. Each box can only be opened with its own key. How can I open both boxes?

Oh that's a terrible shame

2007-05-29T21:19:00.001-07:00

Perhaps it's just my imagination, but the word Schadenfreude seems to be in much heavier rotation these days than it was 10 years ago. Or perhaps it just appears that way to me because of the company I keep. (Like, no offense. At least you're well read. Very nasty sometimes, but exceedingly well read.)

A blog called Separated by a Common Language held a contest this year to find the best import from British English to American English and vice versa (wanker and muffin top**, respectively, if you don't want to rouse your great corpse sufficiently to click the link). The blog's author also gave out a special award to the best word coined by one of her readers. The word: Googleschaden. Its definition: the way in which pundits' past pontifications can now come back to haunt them. More to the point though, surely, is the satisfaction the rest of us feel when this happens.

Yes, if you've said Bad Things about your employer on the Internet using your Real Name (watch yourselves on those newsgroups!), you might regret it. But, goodness knows, you have my heartfelt sympathy.

**I can't bear to define this for you. Do you already know what it is?

Regularly scheduled programming

2007-05-29T20:01:00.001-07:00

When I started this, I promised myself that I would not let more than two days go by without a post... and, good christ, it's been SIX! I fear that I've lost my regular readers (i.e., Darren).

Here's what I've been up to:
1. Hosting friends.
2. Working hard.
3. Teaching Sweet Girl to ride her bike (she's the only 7-year-old who is unable to ride a 2-wheeler, tie shoelaces, or swim, but she can play a mean Ode to Joy on the piano, and she's very, very good at Yelling).
4. Avoiding calls from the PAC (that's Parent Advisory Council to you). I'm not one of those volunteering mothers.
5. Planning Dear Boy's 5th birthday. Cutting out donkey shapes, buying plastic crap, etc.

I miss you all, though! Will think of something clever to write soon.

If not who, which?

2007-05-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

Mark asked (he knows I live for this kind of thing):

I have a grammar question: Is it correct to use the pronoun "which" to describe a person, as in "They were the people which were represented by stone pillars...." Or must it be "They were the people who were..."

According to Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage and The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, it's neither grammatically incorrect nor unprecedented in usage to use which (or that) to refer to people or entities that consist of people. Examples abound.

For instance, older translations of The Bible have these versions of a well-known line:

Our Father which art in Heaven (1611)

and

Our Father that art in Heaven (1885)

before settling on:

Our Father who art in Heaven

That duly acknowledged, however, both MW and Fowler's agree that it is more common and more widely accepted to use who for references to people. This move also means that you don't have to worry about whether the relative pronoun is part of a restrictive clause. (Should the which be a that or vice-versa and does it matter? If you use who, it's the same pronoun either way.)

Anywho, this is all just a long-winded way of recommending that you use who. But know that if you decide against it, you're neither wrong nor in poor company.

Take your time with lollies

2007-05-22T20:42:00.000-07:00

Whenever I go to San Francisco, I stop at the same little airport shop to pick up something for the kids on my way home. I try to get something different each time I go. This time, I was all set to buy a 3-dollar bag of salt-water taffies, each wrapped in its own translucent white paper (I love the paper! I love it way better than I love the taffies!), when the woman behind me in line started talking up the See's Candy Lollipops. They were about 15 dollars, but they did look good! The check-out clerk agreed—they were good! Another person in the line thought they were good too! So I thought, heck, I can part with the extra 12 dollars for something as good as that. I bought them.

And they are so good! Cafe cream, chocolate, vanilla, and caramel. (I think the marketing team was completely out of ideas after naming the coffee one.) I totally recommend them. Keep an eye out next time you're there.

I always, always, crunch hard candy. I can't not crunch it. I'm in a rush, you see. My mother has spoken to me about this many times over the years (quite recently, too), but I never really thought that anything bad would actually happen to my teeth.

(Can you guess what's about to happen?)

So, the other day, I was crunching away on a vanilla one, when I thought, "HEY! There are little ROCKS in this lolly!!!!!" Scenes of legal action started running through my head. Not that I am really the litigating type, but I could be! I COULD BE! What if this isn't rocks? What if it is mouse bones or something?

It wasn't rocks. You know what it was: my molar. Upper right. In bits. Pretty much destroyed. Sad, hey? It didn't really hurt though, and—good news—it got me to the dentist. There was a lot of drilling but it was nothing like what James Frey went through (or did he? Or. Did. He?) in A Million Little Pieces.

I have a temporary crown on that molar at present. I go back next week for the porcelain one. I haven't had a lolly since this happened, but I will. And I will be patient with it.

This is the second in the Challenge category. See what Mark and Zoot have come up with.

Waiting for a Train

2007-05-21T09:18:00.000-07:00

Here's another puzzle. I came across a version of this puzzle in one of Paul Sloane's books, but I don't know who originally created it.

OK, there's a guy called Dennis (why Dennis? Because we're in that sort of mood, that's why. Tell me if this makes you laugh). He has two girlfriends: one lives in City A and the other in City C. Dennis lives in City B, which is between City A and C. He visits one of his girlfriends each weekend. He travels by train: a northbound train takes him to City A; a southbound train to City C.

Now Dennis loves both of these girls equally. So equally, in fact, that he can never decide which one to visit. He leaves his visits in the hands of Fate. When he goes to the station for his weekend away, he arrives at a random time and waits for the first train that comes along: that decides whether he goes north or south. Because both trains leave at half-hour intervals, Dennis figures that he has an equal chance of going north or south. He figures that over the long run, things should even out and he would visit the girlfriends approximately the same number of times.

This is not how things turned out. After a year's worth of visits, Dennis has visited the girlfriend in City A approximately eighty percent of the time. The girlfriend in City C has been sorely neglected.

Why?

The Case of the Missing Apostrophe

2007-05-19T23:28:00.000-07:00

Guess what!!!! (I'm pretty excited about this.) I found out why Tim Hortons has no apostrophe!!!! There is a Real Reason!!!!**

Here's what my research has yielded. Sit down and listen.

The restaurant started out (in Ontario in the 1960s) as Tim Horton's. The apostrophe was dropped only when the chain expanded into Quebec (not sure when that was). In Quebec, by law, all business signage has to be translated into French, so Tim Horton's Donuts would become Les donuts de Tim Horton. Producing new signs for Quebec would be expensive, so the chain dropped the apostrophe and became Tim Hortons (pretending, you'll notice, that this somehow removes any hint of the possessive. By the letter of the law, maybe, but it doesn't change the semantics).

In English Canada, we complain about the missing apostrophe. In Quebec, no one is fooled. They know exactement what went down.

**I doubt the same can be said for Milestone's.

Swearing

2007-05-19T22:25:00.000-07:00

I don't swear much. Well, I do, but it's just bottom drawer sort of swearing. Bloody this and Damn that. Oh for God's Sake! this and Bugger that. (What? WHAT??) This isn't to say that I mind it when other people swear—I don't mind a really boiling curse, as long as it is delivered at the appropriate time and with confidence.

Confidence is the crux of my problem. When I swear, I feel like I do when I'm wearing a wide-brimmed red hat. Or enormous earrings. Or sunglasses with rhinestones. Or all at once! Imagine that. On someone else: charming; on me: ridiculous. When I swear, I feel like I'm on stage, delivering a line... badly. The timing is off. I feel like I have invisible finger quotes in spasm above my head.

I can't even manage it in writing. (And don't even suggest those censorious asterisks.) Lucky for you. You can send the kids here and feel quite safe—they're in good hands.

$136

2007-05-18T00:41:00.001-07:00

Time for another puzzle. And, like, way to go with the problem solving to-date! You're just encouraging me to keep this up.

This one is from my friend J. I cried quietly to myself when he first sent it to me, but I solved it in the end. I know you can too.

You have $136. You have to divide it up into some number of bags, in whole dollar increments, so that I can come along and ask brashly for any amount and you can give it to me by handing over one or more bags (without rearranging the amounts inside). What is the minimum number of bags you require?

I had to ask J a couple of follow-up questions; I'll repeat them here for your benefit:
Q: Do I know the amount in each bag?
A: Um. Yes. (duh)
Q: When you ask for an amount, can you ask only for whole dollar increments? (Like, $12.56 is not allowed, right?)
A: Correct.

Strawberry tart!

2007-05-18T00:19:00.000-07:00

Did you know that Tim Hortons has strawberry tart on the menu? It reminds my very silly friend Pete of this:

Woman: (Switching the radio off) Liberal rubbish. Klaus, What do you want with your jugged fish?
Man: Halibut.
Woman: The jugged fish is halibut.
Man: Well, what fish have you got that isn't jugged?
Woman: Rabbit.
Man: What? Rabbit fish?
Woman: Yes. It's got fins.
Man: Is it dead?
Woman: Well, it was coughing up blood last night.
Man: All right I'll have the dead unjugged rabbit fish.
ONE DEAD UNJUGGED RABBIT FISH LATER
Man: Well that was really horrible.
Woman: You're always complaining.
Man: What's for afters?
Woman: Well there's rat cake ... rat sorbet ... rat pudding ... or strawberry tart.
Man: Strawberry tart?!
Woman: Well, it's got some rat in it.
Man: How much?
Woman: Three (rather a lot really).
Man: Well, I'll have a slice without so much rat in it.
ONE SLICE OF STRAWBERRY TART WITHOUT SO MUCH RAT IN IT LATER
Man: Appalling.
Woman: Moan, moan, moan.

From Episode 29, Monthy Python's Flying Circus.

As for me? Lawks, before today, I didn't even know Tim Hortons had strawberry tart. I never go there. It has nothing to do with the missing apostrophe (I'm trying really hard not to mind about that; can you tell?). It has nothing to do with anything, really, I just... well, I never go there. So there. It's not deliberate. Stop going on about it.

Anyway, Pete: thanks for the laugh. And thanks for making sure we don't go too many days without a new rat recipe.

Goodbye Fallwell

2007-05-16T21:21:00.001-07:00

The Friendly Atheist has compiled some reactions to Fallwell's death from various groups and individuals, starting with the American Atheists and working his way down, down, down to Pat Robertson. You can read them all here, but here are the bookends:

American Atheists:

...the Rev. Jerry Falwell was a dangerous man who opposed and worked against many of the key values underpinning our secular American democracy.

Pat Robertson:

Jerry’s courage and strength of convictions will be sadly missed in this time of increasing moral relativism.

The Friendly Atheist also posted a link to a CNN interview with Christopher Hitchens. It includes some stellar quotes, including this one:

The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend. Who would, even at [CNN], have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September the 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification?

And there's lots, lots more being said in the blogosphere. I've never seen so many atheists wishing so fervently that hell exists!

Biographies

2007-05-16T20:27:00.000-07:00

I like very few biographies (auto or otherwise). Actually, now that I come to think of it, I read very few biographies. They simply don't tempt me. I stride right by the biography section in the bookstore or library without it even registering in my field of vision. Kinda like true crime, romance, sports, self-help (well, I do notice self-help. I point and laugh at it a bit and move on), interior design, astrology, and graphic novels.

I only go for biographies of people I'm already completely captivated (obsessed?) by. Usually writers. Here are some I've read and loved:
- By Heart: Elizabeth Smart a Life, by Rosemary Sullivan
- Experience, Martin Amis
- Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry
- Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
- Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer's Workbook, Timothy Findley

But if I don't already know you and love you...meh. Don't want to read about you.

Ahem. We were assigned an autobiography at book club last week. Not going to say what it is yet. I'll give it a chance: it might be good. I will read it cheerfully. I still owe them one for Confederacy of Dunces.

And maybe I will find that I can be captivated by the life story first, and the life's work second.

Ethos

2007-05-15T21:11:00.000-07:00

I don't think I ever say the word ethos out loud. Good thing, too, because if I did I might stop getting invited to parties.** Ir-reee-DEEM-ably pretentious. Right?

You might think so if you had a look in Merriam Webster:

ethos (n.): The distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of a person, group, or institution.

What's wrong with simply saying character or moral nature, for heaven's sake? Aren't those better choices?

Yes: for that definition. But there is a particular use of the word ethos that MW doesn't tackle head-on. And for this use, really, no synonym quite does the job.

Ethos is one of the three modes of persuasion that Aristotle lists in On Rhetoric. (The other two are logos and pathos, but I'll leave those for now.) As a mode of persuasion, ethos is appeal to authority. You hear speakers (and read writers) do this all the time. They do it when they argue that they are suitable to represent their position:

- I've been an MP in this riding for 12 years and I know my constituents: they don't want a needle-exchange program.

- I'm a tenured professor in Stanford's philosophy department, and I say the ontological argument for the existence of God stinks, I tell you, it stinks!

- As your doctor, I should tell you that all that echinacea tea you're drinking isn't doing a darned thing.

Notice that none of these statements above makes any argument for the truth of their claims other than a simple appeal to the authority—the credibility—of the speaker. It's not enough to establish the truth of a proposition, but it is often persuasive.

So why do I murmur ethos quietly to myself from time to time?

Because if we don't have sufficient authority ourselves (damn! I'm not an MP/tenured philosophy professor at Stanford/doctor!), we borrow it. I do it all the time:

- Studies have shown...

- My mum says...

- Everybody knows...

(And here's a recent example, which is what got me thinking about this tonight.)

I have to watch it; someone may catch on. But keep in mind that you can't really dismiss an argument because you don't think the speaker has sufficient ethos. (Well, you can, but you shouldn't.) You have to look at how the argument hangs together logically. And that's logos.... (at least that's what the experts tell me) and maybe I'll talk about that another time.

**Wait, wait, waaaaaaaaaaait a minute—I already have stopped getting invited to parties. Damn! It's 'cause I said semiotics once, right? I can't believe you heard that. But that was only a joke! Honest! I wouldn't know a semiotics if it stood up in my soup!

Punctuate this

2007-05-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

Can you punctuate the following text to make it meaningful? It is possible:

Smith where Jones had had had had had had had had had had had had had the headmasters approval

Like, "Like"

2007-05-13T11:13:00.000-07:00

I've received some e-mail on this post. More than anything, what gets goats about that post is this:

"The party which I told you about yesterday was, like, super fun."

I expected you to object to which. I've certainly heard you on the subject of restrictive clauses before! But no—it turns out that you don't like like. (And one of you, L------, doesn't like super fun, but I'll leave that for the moment. It was super fun, dammit. I know: I was there!).

Is like, in this case, ungrammatical?

No. Language Log posters have had lots of posts on this subject and here's a good one from Invented Usage. All give at least a nod, if not a genuflecting bow, to M. Siegel's paper: "Like: The Discourse Particle and Semantics" (J. of Semantics 19(1), Feb. 2002). I've borrowed heavily from their legwork, so, like, ladles of acknowledgement are seriously in order.

Like seems to be used primarily (though not exclusively) to either emphasize or signal a hedge about vocabulary choice. In these cases, it modifies a noun (or noun phrase) or verb (or verb phrase). For example:

- "Hume wondered whether the, like, causal connection, actually exists." (Lots of similar hedges are perfectly acceptable. Consider if you will or as it were or um.)

- "Did you, like, publish it already?" (Compare with and let me be clear on this.)

- "It was, like, super fun." (Ditto.)

Like is also, of course, used to signal a quote: "She was like, 'Hobbes was fond of his dram.'" (One day I'll have to write something about that other reviled quote signaller: all. "She was all, 'Hobbes was fond of his dram.'" Or how about both together?? "She was all like, 'Hobbes was fond of his dram.'")

I bet you can come up with some more examples, especially if you live with kids. Do they influence us or is the other way 'round? My 7-year-old was listening to me on the phone with a friend the other day. When I hung up, she said "You just said 'like' three times." Ooops.

Pundles

2007-05-11T23:30:00.000-07:00

I'm underwhelmed at the number of answers (correct or otherwise) I've received so far to the puzzles I've posted. But I'll keep it up because I'm, um, into this kind of thing.

Have you heard of pundles? These are puzzles like this old chestnut:

man

-------

board

(psssst: "Man Overboard!" But you knew that already.)

These can get rather clever. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. WwOoOlLf

2. H2O + NaCl, H2O + NaCl
--------------------------------
C C C C C C C

3. GfRoAoVtE

Have a go.

O Best Beloved

2007-05-10T21:15:00.000-07:00

Don't make 'em too vulgar-big. I wouldn't look like Giraffe—not for ever so.

Leopard started out as the 'sclusivest sandiest-yellowest-brownest of them all. No spots at all! When he lived on the High Veldt, O Best Beloved, he could easily hide and surprise Giraffe and Zebra and all the rest of 'em out of their jumpsome lives. He could indeed! After a time, though, they learned to avoid anything that looked like a Leopard. And finally Giraffe and Zebra moved to the forest, which was all 'sclusively speckled and sprottled and spottled, dotted and splashed and slashed and hatched and cross-hatched with shadows.

Leopard wondered where his where all his breakfasts and dinners and teas had gone. And when he went to look, he stood out like a sunflower against a tarred fence. Leopard needed to change his skin. And he did, O Best Beloved! He did indeed—he got all fulsome spotty and dappled. Now Leopard can lie out on the bare ground and look like a heap of pebbles. He can lie out on a leafy branch and look like sunshine sifting through the leaves. He can lie right across the centre of a path and look like nothing in particular. And he can catch Giraffe and Zebra. Oh yes he can!

I'll tell you a secret, O Best Beloved....

The Ethiopian didn't press on those spots. He didn't do it with his five fingertips. He didn't indeed! Forget what's in the "intelligent design" section in your new biology text books, O Best Beloved! (I don't think even grown-ups would keep on saying such a silly thing if their president didn't say it—do you?) No—it's called natural selection, O Best Beloved, and you can look it up!

Photo credit: Dianne Chamberlain.
Gratitude and heaps of acknowledgement of course to Rudyard Kipling.

The zoot challenge

2007-05-10T21:08:00.001-07:00

Zoot (a close friend and, well OK, relation) has issued a challenge to me and Mark: each week one of us will provide a photo and then we all write about it without peeking at each other's posts. Deadline: midnight PST. Today is the first challenge. You'll see my effort in the next post. I have a little under three hours and a heck of a lot of thinking to do.

For this, I'm introducing a new label to this space: challenge.

I'll just stay behind, thanks

2007-05-09T22:30:00.000-07:00

Have you heard of the Left Behind video game? It's the Book of Revelations brought to life in CGI. Available at WalMart. Guess who you get to shoot? Non-Christians, that's who! Yeah! Never too early to teach kids all about religious warfare!

But apparently its user interface is crap.

Whatever... Worse than "No Problem"?

2007-05-09T21:59:00.000-07:00

Mark's great post about "no problem" reminded me of an article by Nick Paumgarten that I read in The New Yorker magazine a couple of years ago. It was about another supremely annoying response: "whatever." Until I read Paumgarten's article, I couldn't articulate why exactly I found this so irritating...

The article is worth reading in full because Paumgarten weaves in a lovely anecdote about Russell Crowe exploding into physical violence when a hotel desk clerk gives the "W" response to Russell's complaints about the phone service. (I'm not usually on the side of physical violence, but My Dear, there are limits to what one simple Australian can be expected to take.)

Here are the hightlights:

"'Whatever' is as incendiary as it is nonchalant; the nonchalance is what makes it incendiary. 'Whatever' turns disengagement into something withering and mean."

"...moralists ... regard the routine deployment of 'whatever' as the ultimate symptom of indifference in the culture at large."

"The word immediately exhibits a complete lack of respect for your point of view or situation...It’s basically saying that your point of view is crap."

Exactly.

What Was She Thinking? Notes on Class

2007-05-09T20:44:00.000-07:00

My book club meets tomorrow. It's usually quite a drunk-fest, and frankly we rarely get around to discussing the book, but I want to be prepared this time because they actually let me pick the book. It's the first time they let me pick since I picked Confederacy of Dunces last year, which Did Not Go Over Well To Put It Mildly. In fact, it went over so badly that I hear about it pretty much every time we meet ("...well, that one sucked but at least it didn't suck as hard as Confederacy of Dunces," is a typical remark you'll hear two or three times on a given evening.) It's only with large reservations that they were willing to give my current suggestion, What Was She Thinking (Notes on a Scandal) by Zoe Heller, a try. I've got a lot on the line, so I've got to get organized.

I don't want to bore you with the same old summary you'll find in everyone's Amazon.ca (or .com, if you prefer) reviews, but I'll just give you a super-duper quick synopsis to put you in the picture before I get to my main point. The story is set in modern England. Barbara, the narrator, is a teacher and is usually described as a bitter old spinster (or something worse) which is a bit narrow I think but I'll let it go. She is formidable but lonely, and she latches onto a bright, beautiful, upper class teacher called Sheba who is new at the school. Barbara is obsessed with Sheba and her life, and this topic makes up the bulk of the narrative. Sheba starts an affair with a teenaged boy at the school and this is the scandal referred to by the title (or is it? hmmm....I'll let you decide). Of course, it all comes out in the end—Barbara plays a key role in this—and Barbara records every detail in her notes.

What really struck me about the book—and I've been surprised that I haven't seen much written about this elsewhere—was how much class came into the story. Barbara is middle class and she is critical of those that she perceives to be above or below her social class. She also is an intellectual snob (does that go with being middle class? Not sure). The book has plenty of revealing examples of her feelings about this.

Barbara's snobbery is not surprising; it's pretty consistent with what you learn about her character throughout the book. What does come as a surprise, at least to me, is Sheba's snobbery. This is only revealed at the very end of the story, when Sheba finally explodes at Barbara after discovering that she was the one that spilled the beans about the affair and has been keeping detailed unflattering notes of the whole business. Up until this point, Sheba is portrayed as wonderfully accepting and nonjudgmental—this is part of her charm—but of course this could be because we are seeing her through Barbara's eyes and hearing what Barbara chooses to tell us.

So, here is what Sheba says near the end. (Keep in mind that Sheba is unspeakably furious at Barbara. She blames Barbara for the loss of her family, her reputation, her lover, her job, her home...everything. And this is the worst insult she can come up with. Very telling.)

"You have such delusions of grandeur, don't you? It's fascinating.
You actually think you're somebody. Listen. Let me tell you something. You're nothing. A bitter old virgin from Eastbourne."

OK, this is going to be my angle for Friday night. Wish me luck. And if I'm looking for a new book club on Saturday, you'll know why!

Rat fricassee

2007-05-07T21:21:00.000-07:00

My family and I just had a lovely visit with our friends Mich and Pete and their two darling daughters. The kids spent a lot of time playing make-believe. One of the games that I think my 7-year-old came up with, bless her, had the kids piling the rat toys that M&P have lying around (I'm just going to let that go without much comment, but yes, rat toys plural) into a large cast-iron frying pan. This reminded Pete, and Pete reminded me, of this:

Blackadder: [suspicious] What's on the menu?
Baldrick: Rat. [shows him a big black rat] Saute or fricassee.
Blackadder: [peers at the rat] Oh, the agony of choice. Saute involves...?
Baldrick: Well, you take the freshly shaved rat, and you marinade it in a puddle for a while.
Blackadder: Hmm, for how long?
Baldrick: Until it's drowned. Then you stretch it out under a hot light bulb, then you get within dashing distance of the latrine, and then you scoff it right down.
Blackadder: So that's sauteing. And fricasseeing?
Baldrick: Exactly the same, just a slightly bigger rat.

Black Adder IV, Episode 1 (Captain Cook)

No problem

2007-05-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

[No problem] has replaced "You're welcome," but it implies something very very different. It implies that something that would have been a problem wasn't, only because of the very positive attitude of the person saying it.

For the rest of this hilarious and perceptive post about the phrase "no problem," (only in America, I swear), read this: http://functioncall.blogspot.com/2007/05/non-problematic-thinking.html.

It's great.

Lights and switches

2007-05-07T11:55:00.001-07:00

Here's another of my favorite puzzles:

You have three switches connected to three bulbs. The switches and bulbs are in different rooms. You can't see the bulbs from the switch room and vice-versa.

Your task: adjust the switches and then make a single visit to the bulb room to determine which switch is connected to which bulb. You can't revisit the switch room after you leave it.

Margery Allingham

2007-05-04T11:02:00.000-07:00

I love Margery Allingham. She wrote mystery novels for the most part; many could be categorized as adventure stories too. But it's not usually the plot of her novels that I love (although I have no complaint about the way she spun a yarn). I don't care who dun it. I don't find myself racing towards the ending, dying to know how it all comes out. No. What I love are Allingham's characters and her descriptions of universal human feelings and behaviour—so often, I find myself thinking, "Yes... that's captured it exactly." And often it's just a word or two in a passage that does the trick.

I just re-read The Fashion in Shrouds, first published in 1938. The first thing that struck me was the simple phrase "sickening deterioration" that Allingham uses to describe the feeling that one gets when one's love is gradually losing interest and one knows it. Perfect.

And how about this, a paragraph that appears near the beginning of Chapter 8 after an embarrassing scene at a restaurant:

It was a comic moment but it passed too soon, leaving only a growing sense of embarrassment as half-a-dozen diners at other tables swung round to stare with that insolence which comes from an attempt to look casual, or perhaps invisible, before they returned to warn their companions not to look round immediately.

Insolence. Without that word, I suspect the paragraph would not have caught my eye. I certainly wouldn't be telling you about it. But its presence made me stop and read the passage through a couple of times, relishing the aptness of the description.

Great God in Boots!

2007-05-04T02:38:00.000-07:00

I love the following quote from the Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 1 (1967):

For two or three years...I was a Hegelian. I remember the exact moment during my fourth year when I became one. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco, and was going back with it along Trinity Lane, when I suddenly threw it up in the air and exclaimed: "Great God in Boots! -- the ontological argument is sound!"

Ontological arguments proceed from a priori premises (by reason alone) to a conclusion. The first version of the ontological argument for the existence of God was made by St. Anselm in the 11th century. He claimed that it is self-contradictory to state that God does not exist:
1. God is, by definition, a being greater than which nothing greater can be imagined.
2. Existence in reality is greater than existence only in the mind.
3. God must exist in reality; otherwise, God would not be that which nothing greater can be imagined.

(Thanks to wikipedia for this simplified version of the argument.)

Compelling though this argument has been, in one form or another, to many over the years, even Russell changed his mind before too long and of course became a famous atheist. (Or agnostic, if you prefer. Russell dithered a bit about how to best categorize his position. For other philosophers, Russell felt that agnostic was the more precise term: absence of belief in god rather than presence of belief in no god. However, he agreed that for the person in the street, atheist was the more meaningful label).

Many rebuttals to the ontological argument object to the notion of existence as a property. Attackers (including Kant) argue that considering existence as a property confuses the distinction between a idea of a thing and the thing itself. Other objections criticise the "truth by definition" in premise 1.

However, my point here is not to refute the argument. I just wanted to share with you this lovely image of the young crane (Crane?)-like Russell, strolling through Cambridge on an evening long ago, thinking about this argument, and then suddenly stopping and tossing his tobacco tin into the air in excitement as an idea took hold. Isn't that gorgeous? It's one of my favorite philosophical anecdotes (SO much more pleasant than Wittgenstein allegedly lunging at Popper with that bloody poker).

P.S.: For quite a nice write-up about the ontological argument and various objections to it, see this entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/

Are you hungry? Angry?

2007-05-04T01:47:00.000-07:00

This is my favorite comic at the moment. I love xkcd's comics in general (see sidebar for a link), but this particular one is special—it is funny, involves a famously annoying puzzle, takes the hatless one down a peg or two, and has a satisfyingly gory outcome (as gory as it can get for stick figures, at any rate).

iDont

2007-05-04T00:50:00.000-07:00

Have you seen this? Available from iBelieve.

I don't know what to say. Except to ask the obvious questions:
Whatever will they think of next?
How do I get an upside down version?
What would Brian Boytano say?

How do you measure 45 minutes?

2007-05-04T00:17:00.000-07:00

Here's one of my favorite puzzles. You have to, like, PROMISE not to go a-googling for the answer.

You have two pieces of string. They are of different lengths and different materials. All you know is that each one, when lit on the end, takes exactly one hour to burn up completely. You can't assume that either burns at a consistent rate; for instance, one may burn quickly at first and slow down near the end, and the other may (or may not) do the opposite.

Using only the strings and some matches, how do you measure 45 minutes?

[Hat tip to Darren.]

Send me your favorite ones.

Do you get excited when I say "Cray"?

2007-05-03T23:09:00.001-07:00

Geek chic. For about a week, I thought I might have invented the term. And then I got around to googling it and, um, no. No. It's been around awhile and seems to be in wide use. It gets nearly a million google-hits, in fact.

Be that as it may, I got a taste of what it is to have this mysterious quality a couple of years ago when I worked for Cray. At parties, rather than leading a conga line (tiring) or tying a maraschino cherry stem in a knot with my tongue (impossible), I found I got quite a respectable circle of admirers when I said these four words:

"I work for Cray."

[Inevitably, this would be received with awe and amazement. And confusion: I live in Canada. It wouldn't have had nearly the same effect in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where everyone works, or has worked, for Cray.]

Responses were along the lines of:
"You mean, Cray as in the supercomputer company?"
"Oh My God Are You Single?"
"Didn't SGI buy them?"
"You guys running Linux on the dual-core Opterons?"
"How many teraFLOPS are we talking about?"
"Whoa."
"What the hell are you trying to do with that cherry stem?"
...and so on.

I suppose this says something about the type of parties I go to. Everyone always knows who Cray is. Everyone can quote the Dead Parrot sketch. Many prefer to do complex calculations in hex rather than tired old decimal. And many will happily discuss their recent Risk victories in much the way that Rimmer did on Red Dwarf: "Anyway, to cut a long story short I threw a five and a four which beat his three and a two, another double six followed by a double four and a double five. After he'd thrown a three and a two I threw a six and a three."

I'm sorry I don't work for Cray anymore. The technology was cool, the people were amazing, and I loved those trips to the mid-West, but—in all honesty—it's that look of awe from thin bespectacled male strangers that I miss the most. I just don't get the same sort of attention anymore.

P.S.: Did you ever see that Simpson's episode in which Homer is temporarily replacing Smithers as Mr. Burns's assistant? In one scene, Homer is trying to bring Mr. Burns all the things he asks for and failing miserably. Mr. Burns scorns it all:
"You call this breakfast?" [flinging plates to the floor]
"You call this a tax return?" [sweeping papers off the desk]
"You call this a supercomputer?" [using a crowbar to smash a large machine that is very clearly marked CRAY across the top]
...and on and on. I thought it was hilarious.

Who threw that ball?

2007-05-03T22:38:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase William of Occam: "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."

Now, William was a religious man; however, his principle (known as Occam's razor) is frequently used by atheists, scientists, and other clever people to argue against belief in god. Here's approximately how it goes: Existence is mysterious. God is mysterious. To explain existence by trotting out God is to simply to compound the mystery: we haven't actually simplified anything. And the added mystery is arguably even more mysterious because it asks us to lay aside reason (omnipotence? omniscience? AND omnibenevolence? In this world?). Surely a hypothetical creator requires an even greater explanation than the phenomena that it's meant to explain.

That's like saying, "Hm. Broken window. Wonder how that happened. I do see a baseball lying there in the broken glass, and y-e-s-s-s-s.... those are some 9-year-olds running away and whooping with laughter, but I have my doubts. Yes, I have my doubts. No one actually saw the ball leave the tip of their bat and crash through the glass, right? In that case, I'm gonna go for Tash. Tash was responsible for this, mark my words. Oh? You don't believe in Tash? Just because there's no evidence for his existence? Well, he's shy that way. It's part of his...."

Oh, that should do it. I think you get where I am going with this. Surely the simplest solution is the 9-year-olds, right? You all agree with me there? So why is it that for the most important of question of all, so many of us would rather choose the more mysterious and complex answer over the simpler, more reasonable, and scientifically sound alternative?

Who are you going to give that gin to?

2007-05-03T22:08:00.000-07:00

What is wrong with the grammar in the following sentences? C'mon, this is a test. Sit up straight, spit out your gum, suck in your stomach, and pay attention. I know you love this kind of thing.

1. I am going to quickly run to the liquor store; what's your fancy?

2. Who are you going to give that gin to?

3. If anyone looks like they've had one too many, get them the hell out of my car.

4. The party which I told you about yesterday was, like, super fun.

Think you know? I hope you've scratched down some ideas. Would you be surprised if I were to tell you that all four sentences are grammatically just dandy?

[Update 2007/05/07: Some of you seem disinclined to take my word for it. That's fine; I expected some doubt. I gently lead you here instead, then, for a post by the more impressively degreed and persuasive G. Pullum: http://http//itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004348.html

He doesn't provide the same lurching example sentences, but he addresses the split infinitive, the preposition at the end of the sentence, the singular they, and the which/that distinction.

Note that I have not said anything about style; I'll admit that all of these sentences can be improved, especially if we specify that the gin in question is Bombay Sapphire. My point is only that they are not grammatically incorrect.]