Category Archives: Language

Another Dark and Stormy Night?

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Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, 2009 results

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and phrases like “the great unwashed” and “the almighty dollar,” Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the “Peanuts” beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Here’s the winner of the detective category, in case the contest description isn’t enough of an inducement.

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.

Blame Feynman

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Built on Facts: Failures of Cuteness in Physics

There’s a unit of cross-sectional area used in nuclear physics equal to a trillionth of a trillionth of a square centimeter. It’s roughly the cross-section of a heavy atomic nucleus, and it’s used to discuss interactions with incoming particles. You could say in some ways it’s a measure of how easy it is to hit a nucleus with a projectile like a neutron. A big nucleus is as easy to hit as the broad side of a barn. And the unit is called the barn, for exactly that reason. I have no evidence, but I blame Feynman anyway.

Telling It Like it Is

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Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News

It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.

[…]

Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….”

Finance reporting, I think is an especially egregious offense by reporters. Think about it — no matter what happens in the stock market, the reporters will have some cause ascribed to it. And they’re just making it up. Most days the stock market signal is just noise.

Not Understanding Banter at all Well Today

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Bally Jerry pranged his kite right in the how’s your father. Hairy blighter, dicky-birdied, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper’s and caught his can in the Bertie.

Oh, wait. Bacon in the Asteroid Belt is meant to be taken literally. Answering the timeless question of how much energy it would take to put pork products in orbit. Hmmm. Bacon. Sausage. Sausage. There’s a nice, woody word. (Not at all tinny, like asparagus or celery)

Avoiding the Hobgoblins

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and the foolish consistency they represent.

Flying Flux: The Dullness of Details

I think it behooves writers to make technical documentation fun by embedding a few surprises here and there for the unsuspecting reader. Just like how chip designers used to embed artwork in their chips (I’ve done so myself), writers of technical documents should try to slip in a bit of flowery language from time to time.

For example, let’s look at the following sentence:

Original: Jitter degradation is most sensitive to supply noise between 20 MHz to 80 MHz.

[…]

Simile: The 20-80 MHz supply noise’s effect on the clock edges’ accuracy is like a well-endowed woman doing jumping jacks.

Not Subject to the EEOC

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We’re rearranging the lab, and clearing out some old equipment, including taking down part of the original Cesium Fountain laser layout (which uses a lot of optical table space). A colleague was moving a rack, and wanted to know where it should go. I suggested next to a hard place, but leaving a gap, so something could go in between. Badump-ching!

Fortunately for me, puns are not inherently part of the “creating hostile work environment” definition which applies to Federal employees.

Anyway. part of the laser system of the Cesium fountain (the slightly less dense optics forest on the far side of the table in the picture) is no more. Walking into the lab to see that half the table bare was a bit traumatic for me, since it’s the experiment I raised from a pup. But my colleagues said the setup isn’t really gone — they moved that part of the experiment to a very nice lab out on a farm, and assured me that the optics were much happier there, because it has very nice temperature control and people to clean the mirrors and keep everything aligned. So I feel a lot better about that.

Speak the Geek!

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It’s Talk Like a Physicist Day!

I gave a rather extended vocabulary list last year, and used a lot of those terms. A few more that I’ve used in the last year:

I mentioned a quantum, to mean a small amount, as in “take that with a quantum of salt”

I used “collapse the wave function” to denote resolving something, as in “the election collapsed the presidential race wave function”

resonated — already in common use

a short amount of time became “a small delta-t”

a wide variety of something I called a spectrum

I refer to a rumor (aka nebulous information) as “Nth-hand information”

I didn’t forget, I “expunged this from the buffer”

An either/or situation is a Boolean state

Happy New Year’s Day was “Happy return to an arbitrarily chosen starting point in the orbit about our gravitational enslaver”

When something came close to me, it was at perigee

And of course, the blogging community is called the blogohedron

I also like making up measuring devices, like the cringe-o-meter to measure how painful something looks, or the Geekmeter. “Pegging the Geekmeter” is a large signal, and means you’re in a maximal “Talk Like a Physicist” state.

Made-up “elements” I’ve used in the last year

Politicium
Grinchonium
Quiltonium
Elephantium
Nerdonium

And some new vocabulary and ways to use it:

Incompatible things are “out of phase.” “Pi out of phase” is the ultimate in being out-of-step, which leads to destructive interference.

Something that is close is “within epsilon”

We physicists quantify relationships — something that is complicated is “nonlinear,” or even “highly nonlinear.” Opposites are “inversely proportional”

Two different things happening at once can be said to be in a superposition (That’s a superposition of painful and funny!)

If something doesn’t happen, you can say the wave functions just didn’t overlap

It’s not unclear, it’s opaque

A situation that’s impossible to resolve has overconstrained boundary conditions

It’s not a hill/ditch, it’s local maximum/minimum