The grand oracle rama rama CNN says:
Common seasonal flu kills 250,000 to 500,000 people every year worldwide, far more than the current outbreak of swine flu. But there is a vaccine for seasonal flu.
“Watching” language nerds argue over the proper usage of “begs the question” is just a completely insane and inane experience.
Well, I guess it’s not so much proper usage as it is acceptable usage. The proper usage is to refer to the logical fallacy of including the question as a given in the answer, as such.
But, the phrase has more utility and color when used for the alternate purpose, which is to indicate that the prior content really makes one need a new question answered.
It’s just like how I tend to start a lot of sentences in my blog with “But.” I believe many people consider it a hard-and-fast English rule to forbid beginning a sentence with “But.” However, beginning a sentence with “However” [intended] is rarely questioned.
I consider the leading “but” to be a nice conversational/self-argumentative device. I also consider it essentially on equal footing with however. However is not a conjunction, and the rule is drawn on conjunctions.
I would say this type of rule is in the same class as the “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” rule. It’s like a guideline to keep one from sounding stupid.
I suggest “but” is equal in function to “however” when it’s used at the front of the sentence. Pencilheads strike again.
I would say I am surprisingly liberal when it comes to the evolution of language. Watching words being invented and refined is an exciting part of the cultural experience in my eyes. I am much less liberal about written grammar and structure, but mostly written grammar.
Language is bendable, but written grammar in my view is more an expression of respect and dignity. This biggest reason written grammar gets this treatment from me is that we don’t use this type of grammar when we speak (capitalization, punctuation, heck, even spacing).
Written language does not get this treatment, but in recent years the function of written language in burst-type communication like SMS is becoming a proxy for spoken language. Hence the breakdown.
Language is constantly tested by its viability in spoken form. The who/whom situation in English, which is just about as out of control as the predicate nominative pronoun debacle, is a perfect example. We simply, even as particularly expert native speakers, do not have the real-time cognitive resources to figure out when to say who or whom in a real clunker of a sentence.
Even people like me who are quite particular about who/whom are really just applying a few heuristic shortcuts that work most of the time. Like, /always use whom after a preposition/ or /start sentences with who/.
Of course:
“Whom I am going to invite is none of your business.”
blows your heuristic battleship right out of the water. In fact, my proofing run on this article made me really consider the “Even people like me…” sentence above. That who is in a sort of participial thing but is serving as the subject of its clause, and the clause modifies “people” not “me.” I mean, dang, I didn’t even try to make that one hard.
And the sheer unviability of:
“The people most interested in the outcome of the Martian crisis are most certainly they.”
Makes you cringe with irrelevance.
Grammarians are funny when they hear this type of sentence spaghetti going on in practice. My experience (and my own behavior, I’m sure) is to see a brief rolling-back of the eyes, lips moving slightly reconstructing the sentence in sensible grammar-order (“They are the people…”) and then a brief nod, like, “Yeah, that’s right. Good job there.”
Of course, the time you spend making people roll their eyes back to check your grammar is time they aren’t listening to all the questions you beg afterward. It lacks utility. It makes you seem like you rehearsed it. And, to get something really impressive right, you probably did.
Try to take all the “you“s out of that paragraph above, replacing them with the gramatically-preferred “one.” You sound like the flipping Queen of England.
I’ve read creative writing by people who probably were trained by completely unqualified teachers to count sentences, use a certain number of semicolons and “complex sentences” per paragraph, and always have less than N words in their thesis. It’s awful, like, get this out of my face kind of awful. It’s awful because it’s so generic.
These people are also thesaurus monkeys, or shall I say simians. Yeah, I’ll say simians because it makes me sound smarter. “Monkey” is so 10th grade.
But don’t get me started there…
Alex from Iowa writes:
Thanks to CNN for their quality journalism. This is not alarmism! I live in Iowa and a lot of people I know are getting sick! Please take precautions in public. I’m getting surgical masks for me and my family! You can never be too careful.
There are 64 confirmed cases in the entire US with no deaths, so it’s kind of amazing that people are dropping like flies in Iowa, where I don’t even know if you can order a decent burrito. They’re few and far between in Istanbul, I can tell you that.
In other news, do two simultaneous wars not keep these government people busy enough? It’s crazy. “Crass insensitivity” is probably one of the best two-worders I’ve heard in a while.
This is taken totally out of context (the slide is taken from a safety presentation about work permits in operational locations), but my team had a nice hee-haw this morning given my visa status:
They’re beginning to develop a Reddit Hall of Fame. I assume this one will be taking its place soon.
At first, I thought a photoblog would be a pretty spiffy way to communicate my Turkey experience. Now, I’m quite glad I didn’t go that way. I would say that most good photoblogs I have seen actually kind of put the text ahead of the images in terms of importance. The Picasa format is nice because it works more like an interactive paging-through of a photo album rather than having the format and pacing of a magazine or travel book. Maybe if you spent five years living amongst the primates in Madagascar or something you might benefit from prioritized text. But not living in a city like Istanbul and travelling around.
Most things speak for themselves. Or, if there is a good story, it’s a demand-pull effect from the impact of the picture. I think if I took more “walking around the city” pictures a photoblog could be interesting. Because then the story would justify the picture rather than the other way around.
In the realm of other random minor things, I was aghast when we went to the Blue Mosque this weekend that so many female tourists were not covering their heads. The only men I saw wearing hats dutifully took theirs off (the ballcap doesn’t exactly hold a popular position in Turkey). The mosque caretakers actually provide you with scarves if you need them, so there’s really no excuse at all. They force you to take off your shoes, so nobody disobeyed that one.
I think it’s really the least you can do. They’re nice enough to not be horsey about the Ayasofya, which still has the majority of the restorable Christian artwork on the walls, as you can see in the pictures. The Blue Mosque is different, though, as it is an active and quite important mosque even at the worldwide scope. The Ayasofya is a museum, so there really aren’t many expectations of visitors.
Pulling on another plot thread, hats are kind of a funny deal here. I’ve seen some fur-lined numbers with ear flaps and everything. Of course, you have various Muslim-/Sikh-type models (the round cap and the knotted turban type thing, I’m not overly culturally literate here). You have a few Yarmulkahs (wow, really didn’t know how to spell that), as Beyoğlu (the India-shaped promontory that pretty much borders our slightly-north area of Şişli) has a historical Jewish population among many others. There is a lot less Christian Orthodox activity going on here than I ever would have thought. It’s apparently dying out quite a bit.
I self-coined the term “pencilhead” maybe a month or so ago, and checking the web says it is not really commonly used just about anywhere, except maybe in some indie band names. Maybe I’ve blogged about it before. Maybe my work-in-progress blog platform needs a decent search engine…
In general, stock analysts are most definitely pencilheads.
I have struggled to generate a precise definition. I am thinking: “One inclined to perform routine, often time-consuming calculations in preference to applying critical thinking to a problem.” Pencilheads would rather be done than be correct. Pencilheads are also compliance people. A page filled in with garbage data is better than a correct sheet missing items. As long as they didn’t have to generate the garbage.
The corporate function of Finance almost always features a vicious war between a pencilheadish compliance/completeness focus and a freewheeling analytical approach. Honestly, you have to be both. A pure critical-thinking analyst gets into trouble and becomes a bad team player. A pencilhead doesn’t make many enemies outside of the analysts, but they don’t exactly help anyone either.
How can you be a compliance person if you don’t think about the numbers? How can you report numbers if you don’t stress completeness even in the face of pointlessness?
My playlist this morning has incorporated a sequence of contemporary Christian, bluegrass, and underground rap. I would not have touched any of those genres in junior high.
I implemented a web browser in about 15 lines of code last night using Qt/C++ under Linux (the new Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition). I mean, the start page is the only page you can load aside from links from the start page, but it’s something.
In London I had this consuming sort of idea fire going on with a Qt-based equivalent to XFCE. This is complete nonsense, so let’s say essentially a very lightweight Linux desktop environment using a better programming platform than has previously been used for this purpose.
This would likely include a web browser (WebKit-based, in accordance with the new fashion and aligned with Qt’s allegiances), a terminal emulator, a file manager, and probably a basic text editor. It would likely also benefit from a Qt-based window manager, but that prospect is scary to me. It would be really cool to have a graphical manpage reader, but I’m not sure how that would work. This is clearly a developer-/expert-oriented interface, although nothing about it would be particularly incomprehensible.
Qt provides drop-in functionality for most of these (including the framework to refresh a directory view automatically upon update, as of a recent version). This makes this an interesting thing to boot into and play with occasionally, as the wins would be typically rapid and fun. I’m dual-booting the VAIO to make this happen (virtualization is too fat for the poor guy’s resources), so the work is out of sight and out of mind until I want to play with it. My kind of throwaway project.
I thought that this speech was awesome on many levels. Great insights on art, religion, and programming among others. Larry Wall is one of the few vocal Christians amongst the luminaries of free software, so his writings are always neat to read.
It’s long, but it’s worth it.
I’ll take a moment to advocate a much-overlooked band of great ability, Black Lab. I only own Your Body Above Me, but I would gladly look into anything else they made. Black Lab for me creates a sort of bridge between the sad-pop feel of the Gin Blossoms and the pain of a Stabbing Westward without all the vitriolic anger.
You don’t just hear “I love you more than I should / I wrap my heart in bands of rosewood” on the street from day to day, and the poetry in there is pretty poignant once you get used to listening for it. It’s a subtle album, and it doesn’t drink smoothly the first few times. The biggest issue here is the spikey feel of the opening, which starts with the radio hit “Wash It Away” and connects with the other popular success “Time Ago” by way of the much less accessible “She Loves Me” and “X-Ray.”
“Time Ago” would probably be on my all-time top 20 songs list, so it’s hard to get all the way through the very minimalistic, bass-heavy “She Loves Me” without getting a little fidgety. That’s a personal problem for me, though. But the track has spilled over from “Wash It Away” so many times I have come to consider it a favorite on the album. “X-Ray” has had a similar path.
If I had to use a word to describe Black Lab I would say “dramatic” and then request permission to add a second word to make it “tastefully dramatic.”
As an aside, I think almost any art should be described using only two words before dismissing or accepting it. One of those two words should not include “post-” for best results.
They’re one of the few bands I would consider quotable, leaving little gems hidden in the lyrics to find slowly, with many listens.
Wine gets better with age, but I would say a fine bottle of ale gets better with drinking. Black Lab is kind of a fine ale. It’s dark, a little bitter, but if you give it a chance you might be able to call it “chocolatey” or something and impress your friends.