Category: General

Via Arnold Zwicky at Language Log, an explanation for “NPR names”, which I’ve heard mentioned in passing, and for the explanation if which I’m grateful.

NPR names
Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name.  Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.

Unfortunately, “Jonathan Ken” is an awkward starting point for this particular formula. And as for the “smallest foreign town”, well, how would I know? If we take “visit” to mean “stayed the night”, then perhaps Ölmstad (Sweden, near Gränna) may qualify; I spent a few days there with my father visiting my fourth cousin Sigvard Jarl and family. But the “K”, no, I’m sorry, I simply don’t find room for it in “Jonathan”. Perhaps if I discard a few letters? “Konath Ölmstad”? “Kathan Ölmstad”?

Digressing a bit, as a school child I truncated my first name to “Jon”, more out of laziness than any real purpose. I took back “Jonathan” later in life, when I worked in a company with several Johns. But … is it too late for “Jona”?

A further digression: “Jonathan Lundell” doesn’t scan, at least not in English, where we say “JONathan lunDELL”. The dactyl-iamb combination doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. In Sweden, it’d be “JONathan LUNdell” (well, “YOH-nah-tahn LUNdell”, LUN as in PUT), which is an improvement. (Update: but see comments for a corrected view.) “Jona”, on the other foot, is more versatile.

(Goodwife Jo, sadly, has no middle name. No NPR name for her, either.)

Geoff Pullum has for some time now led the charge against Strunk and White’s “horrid little book”. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of The Elements of Style, Pullum pulls his criticisms together in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won’t be celebrating.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

…

It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write “however” or “than me” or “was” or “which,” but can’t tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.

So I won’t be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.

Who is IOZ?

I See A Bad Moon Risin’
Gaymarriage will take away my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Gaymarriage will make hockey players skate on gravel. Gaymarriage will create weakly godlike artificial intelligences that will destroy you, soft, weak human. Gaymarriage will disassemble all of the planets and non-stellar matter in the solar system and create a matrioshka brain of infinite computational power that will achieve demiurgic godhead. Gaymarriage will alter the Planck Constant reordering the physical structure of spacetime itself and causing baryonic matter to cease to exist.

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart — HL Mencken

via Sam Smith

I grew up, in part, near the Red River, in Kittson County MN, closer to Winnipeg than Fargo. My chief memory of the terrain: flat. But I never realized just how flat until I read this in the NY Times this morning.

…the Red River, though fairly modest compared with some more famous rivers, [is] devilishly hard to predict, partly because of its shallow channel. The Colorado River has been carving out the Grand Canyon for millions of years. The Red, by contrast, dates back to perhaps only a few thousand years before the Pyramids. That means it has not had that long to cut deep channels that can contain water during floods.

On top of that, the river flows very slowly across a pancake-flat landscape. Imagine raising an eight-foot-long sheet of plywood just enough to slip a single sheet of paper under the raised end. The resulting minuscule tilt of the board represents the average slope of the Red River’s bed.

What that means is that the river, when it goes awry during a flood, spills every which way across the countryside.

Kennedy MN, where I lived, is about 15 miles from the river on US 75, and it wasn’t uncommon for the spring thaw to spread the river as far as that highway and beyond. The farmers in that direction, with heavy gumbo soils and late, wet springs, needed Caterpillars to draw their plows, where my uncles and cousins to the north and east of town employed conventional wheeled tractors on their lighter, sandier and better-drained fields.

from the flickr account of one “9 0 0 0“

Time Magazine, via Barry Rithotz

Raised Dump Truck Hits Overhead Sign On I-84 In Manchester

“When [the truck] left the construction site and re-entered the highway, the dump body was upright,” said Trooper William Tate, a state police spokesman. “For obvious reasons, that’s wrong.”

via Bob Morris

…Tuesday edition. Because sometimes, you know, God just can’t wait.

Mormon beefcake

From the Chronicle of Higher Education

Brigham Young University has rejected an appeal from a student who had completed all the requirements for a degree but saw his diploma withheld last year after he published Men on a Mission, a calendar of buff Mormon missionaries without shirts, the Associated Press reported.

The student, Chad Henry, was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns the university, over the calendar last July. In September he was told that, to receive his degree, he would need to be reinstated as a member of the Mormon church.

Which reminds me that anyone who hasn’t read Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s wonderful account of how she came to be excommunicated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints really doesn’t know what they are missing.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.

— Mark Twain

A little TLS tease from Andrew Brown.

Sisters, not parent and child

An interesting and important point from John Barton’s essay on conceptions of the afterlife in the current TLS (not online):

Jews and Christians do not of course believe the same things, but the structures of the two faiths are much more similar than people think. This is not surprising, since they are siblings (rather than parent and child), both deriving from the religious culture of Israel in the last few centuries BC (the so-called Second Temple period) with influences from the surrounding Greco-Roman world and its philosophies. The impression that the two religions are so vastly different derives partly from the tendency among Christians to think that Judaism is the same as the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament, as they call it) – whereas in fact the religion of the Second Temple period had changed markedly from that of the ancient Israelites who are the source of the Hebrew Bible; and among Jews, to think of Christianity as a Greek religion only marginally related to Hebrew culture.

E B White, via Sam Smith:

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

Via Jorn Barger, a fully connected network of vices, courtesy of Indexed.

Felix Salmon.

Wine Tasting Datapoint of the Day

Robert Hodgson has a paper out entitled “An Examination of Judge Reliability at a major U.S. Wine Competition”. He had the ingenious idea of serving up three identical glasses of wine — poured from the same bottle — to groups of judges; only 10% of the judging panels managed to rank the three identical wines even in the same medal group, even though the wines were served in the same flight. And, as Peter Mitham reports:

One panel of judges rejected two samples of identical wine, only to award the same wine a double gold in a third tasting.

I’m beginning to think there’s really no such thing as a really good wine: there’s just really bad wine, and everything else.

Amen!

Parnell came down the road,
he said to a cheering man:
“Ireland shall get her freedom
and you still break stone.”

— W B Yeats

In nine(!) easy steps. Who knew that getting out of a car was such a production? Hint: not us boys.

In the shadow of Saturn, unexpected wonders appear. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn recently drifted in giant planet’s shadow for about 12 hours and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun. Cassini saw a view unlike any other. First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against Saturn, but quite bright when viewed away from Saturn and slightly scattering sunlight, in the above exaggerated color image. Saturn’s rings light up so much that new rings were discovered, although they are hard to see in the above image. Visible in spectacular detail, however, is Saturn’s E ring, the ring created by the newly discovered ice-fountains of the moon Enceladus, and the outermost ring visible above. Far in the distance, visible on the image left just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.

…I think we should all be as happy as kings.

Joe the Plumber is headed to Israel, to “cover the Gaza conflict from the Israelis’ point of view”. Is he worried about the danger? Not a bit of it.

“Being a Christian, I’m pretty well protected by God, I believe.”

Being a Jew, of course, doesn’t cut it, and Muslims are right out. The solution is obvious, though.

Not just Gaza.

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts.

A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side … The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

— George Orwell

via M.J. Rosenberg