I was very recently reminded of a one-page story that appeared in the New Yorker some years ago. It drops the prefixes or otherwise negates the meaning of some common words and phrases. The bridled style is very settling.
Thanks to the wonder of the intertubz, it appears online.
How I Met My Wife by Jack Winter
“Is that what you want, Mary? A farter?” Tucker/Norman, “There’s Something About Mary”
To the Royal Academy of Farting, Benjamin Franklin, c. 1781.
That the permitting this Air to escape and mix with the Atmosphere, is usually offensive to the Company, from the fetid Smell that accompanies it.
That all well-bred People therefore, to avoid giving such Offence, forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.
That so retain’d contrary to Nature, it not only gives frequently great present Pain, but occasions future Diseases, such as habitual Cholics, Ruptures, Tympanies, &c. often destructive of the Constitution, & sometimes of Life itself.
I wonder what the impact would have been on social norms if certain gases weren’t invisible.
Update: Another, erm, voice heard from. Science World toots up on the matter.
Photographers being treated as security threats, because that’s how Hollywood portrays things
A movie-plot threat is a specific threat, vivid in our minds like the plot of a movie. You remember them from the months after the 9/11 attacks: anthrax spread from crop dusters, a contaminated milk supply, terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats, from the news, and from actual movies and television shows. These movie plots resonate in our minds and in the minds of others we talk to. And many of us get scared.
And we overreact, because we respond irrationally when faced with unusual risks. We can’t properly assess them.
Mechanization and Standardization
. . . and how some people resist it, thinking manual labor is best.
Given an infinite number of monkeys with Excel, you can produce the client reporting.
(And for those of you who live in 2007 where the idea of having human beings actually touching data is out of the misty past, I bring news from the rest of the world: It’s cold out here, cold as death. The vast majority of business in this country is done in the exact same way your forward-thinking uncle did his taxes in 1986. “That machine? Oh, that machine has the client billing Access database. Don’t touch it.”)
I’m stuck somewhere in that nightmare.
Anyway, the rest of the story is pretty funny.
Jennifer Ouellette has a new blog, not the same as the old blog, at Discovery. Check out Twisted Physics. She promises shorter posts than on Cocktail Party Physics, which isn’t going away.
Rest assured, Cocktail Party Physics isn’t going anywhere. It will continue much the same, staunchly independent and wheezily long-winded.
No word yet on whether we will be able to observe her in a superposition of the two blogs, or what might happen if that wave function collapses.
And that performance enhancing drugs are involved.
NY Times editorial. If Big Brown Wins, Racing Loses
This might sound obvious, but it’s worth stating: horse racing is nothing without the horse. And yet right now the horse’s best interests don’t seem to be paramount in racing.
[. . .]
No one has seriously accused him [current trainer, Richard Dutrow] of doing anything untoward with Big Brown, but he’s been fined or suspended for doping in each of the last eight years, including two instances in January. The Association of Racing Commissioners International report on Dutrow reveals 72 offenses since 1979, 13 of them related to drugs.When a guy like this wins racing’s most prestigious prize, what message does that send to everyone else involved in the sport? It tells owners that they can win by entrusting their horses to a trainer known for bending the rules.
The sport isn’t clean. People cheat, and exploit the ones actually performing.
Yawn.
Continue reading
Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake discovers (among other things) a fine tradition: volunteering in absentia.
Do not oversleep and miss a meeting because the meeting announcement was sent to the e-mail address you don’t use because it’s continually broken, or else you too may draw the short straw in absentia and find yourself in charge of assembling a volume of conference proceedings.
Decisions are made by those who show up. Unpleasant tasks go to those who were conveniently out of the room.
There’s a movement afoot to make the recent “Classic Papers Challenge” a regular event. Suggestions for naming of both the general effort and an alternative term for “carnival” are being solicited. Go on over to Skulls in the Stars and leave a suggestion.
McKee examines story-telling like a biologist dissecting a rat. But after taking it apart, he explains how to build a story yourself using rules that wouldn’t look out of place in a computer programming text book.
[. . .]
Using McKee’s rules they compare the script of the film Casablanca, a classic pre-McKee movie, with scripts of six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), a classic post-Mckee production, and find numerous similarities.That’s hardly surprising since McKee learnt his trade analysing films such as Casablanca, so anything written using his rules should have these similarities.
I also note that one of the producers for CSI has a PhD in applied physics. Chicken? Egg? Common cause?
(Not to name drop, but I went to high school with this person, and actually helped, in some small way, with the first script he wrote)
