saturn return to sender

I’ll again just direct you to a metafilter post, and perhaps the the wikipedia article on synchronicity, because (as if we had any doubts), Douglas Adams was really on to something.

Robert Jordan has a life-threatening disease. I am now two books behind in the Wheel of Time series, which I started reading in 1996. (Holy crap that was a decade ago!*) I’ll probably have to start over before going forward, but I haven’t had the time to do this since going back to school. He has one more book to publish in the WoT series, and about “thirty years” of writing yet to do, and he says he is “going to finish all of those books, all of them, and that is that.”

I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping for the best result from the treatment he will be receiving in the next month. Good luck, Mr. Jordan.

poppies and hills

Grrr. Somehow my CF card was corrupted and I lost 10 or so photos from the past week, including from a short hike today. Nothing of terrible importance is lost to the world forever, but it’s pretty annoying.

I think I blogged this photo a couple of years ago but I recently beautified it in Photoshop and posted it on Flickr, and it’s purty. So here it is again.

I totally have to link to this metafilter post? Because I think it’s funny? And, like, allll of its links are worth visiting?

I’m glad people are starting to take this issue seriously, because every now and then I’ve caught myself uptalking: that teenage-girl/mallspeak affect where the end of every sentence becomes interrogatory in tone. It’s chilling, let me tell you, to realize it can happen to you, too.

I think I usually unconsciously justify it with a “right?” at the end of declaratory sentences that I want to soften into questions. Since I can’t say “right?” at the end of every sentence without sounding obviously inane, I’m just an occasional — you might say social — up-talker. Still … I bet it’s a slipperly slope from an extra question mark now and then to full-on corrosion of the vapid-filter.

Hopefully a cure is just around the corner.

But no: I think there’re at least a few geek variants of the city girl squawk and those are honestly closer to my native dialect. They involve a lot of needlessly involuted structure, such as saying “non-good” instead of just “bad.” “Yeah, it crashed in a very non-good way.”

Of course a shibboleth for geeks is the word “trivial,” and its negative “non-trivial.” As in, “That is a non-trivial omelette you’ve got there.” I try to make it a point not to use this word except when actually appropriate. Namely, when talking about math proofs. But I dunno … That’s probably because no one I hang out with these days would get it. Hmmm. Yeah: If I were in a house full of CS or philosophy people, I’d be a flaming geekspeaker. I don’t see myself ever feeling quite so at home with mallspeak, so perhaps my masculinity is not in quite so much peril.

Regardless, I’m always guilty of sort-of/kind-of softening. I don’t know the origins of this, but I remember feeling sort of self-righteous about it when I realized my freshman year philosophy instructor kind of did it constantly. So yeah: I’m kind of okay with it.

Not that anyone who reads this is likely to get this, but the architect version of kind-of/sort-of is starts-to/begins-to. Nothing ever simply does something. Everything “starts to” do things. “So these perforations start to dematerialize the structure.” “And the natural daylighting starts to reconnect the user with nature.” “Here the commons begins to penetrate the interstitial voids, so the viewer starts to be an integral part of the urban fabric.”

Okay, so those are all kind of forgivable, but it can be ridiculous. In my intro building materials class, the prof showed us a picture of a concrete structure with rebar clearly visible. “And you can really start to see the rebar here,” she said. She also said “literally” all the time so I think what she actually said was “You can literally start to see the rebar here.”

Um. Yes. Yes you can, indeed.

Okay, ramble ramble ramble.