Meditation on Words I had to Look Up

In a story bout Emma Watson (Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films) the writer use the word febrile to describe the situation in a museum when fans recognized Ms Watson.  OK, I wrote it down and looked it up:

febrile -

1. Having or showing the symptoms of a fever.

2. Having or showing a great deal of nervous excitement or energy.

I doubt I'll need the word - Do I even know anyone with a great deal of nervous excitement or energy?   Maybe years ago, but we're all older now, subdued rather than mellow.

Then, in Michael Gorra's review of "When We Were Orphans" by Kazuo Ishiguro (NY Times Sunday Book Review, September 24, 2000) I came across a word with relevance to life as I think I know it.

Englishness -- in fact, human interaction of all kinds -- will remain for him a form of learned behavior, in which he compounds the simulacrum of a character from both the gestures of the people around him and his reading in ''The Wind in the Willows'' or Sherlock Holmes.

simulacrum -

1. an image or likeness.
2. a mere image or one that does not represent the reality of the original.

Is online education as practiced by some of the instructors anything like a real education?  I think of the Comp Sci students rolling their eyes describing one of their courses as watching PowerPoint on the web.  Definitely not the challenging exchange of ideas promised by the school's bulletin.  Paraphrasing a quote from "Good Will Hunting" might be applicable here: an education you could have gotten for a $1.50 in late charges at the public library

And, pardon my riff, the ability to take a Computer Architecture course on youtube with Anshul Kumar, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Delhi might suggest that the quote should be updated to reference internet charges.  While the majority of youtube viewers prefer watching dogs and cats doing tricks to lectures in English with an Indian accent, I find this stuff mesmerizing.

(Of special fascination was a reversal of labels in a slide about Big and Small Endian memory organization.  I thought that a flub like that would be fixed in post production unless they wanted to convey an authentic experience of a professorial stumble.  A classic academic joke has a prof in one of the hard sciences saying that the proof or derivation of an equation is obvious.  When a student has the temerity to ask to see the proof the instructor starts, then stops, stares at the board for a while before rushing from the room, returning many minutes later with notes, continuing, "Like I said, it's obvious."  Then, reading from his notes, the prof completes the problem.)

I saw the next two words in Kathleen McElroy's article, "A Little Rusty?" about adults preparing for standardized grad school tests.

esurient
1. Hungry; greedy.

I don't believe I ever saw this word before. She, as well as other journalists scored surprisingly low on essays because she "hadn’t incorporated G.R.E. vocabulary favorites like “esurient” and “vitiate.  Esurient was dictionary.com's Word of the Day on October 05, 2009 which must give it some sort of cache, but why would anyone use the word except to score points.  (Duh, this is an exam chucklehead.)  

It's not much different than years ago when I was advised that worming agape, amity, and ennui into an essay would increase the grade on and essay half a grade point.  Tough to do in most chemistry and physics reports, although it might work in biochemistry.  (There is the well-known "greedy algorithm" in Huffman compression, but the formal name the greedy algorithm.  The profs I know would probably be miffed to look up esurient to find that it means greed . 

vitiate
1. to impair the quality of; make faulty; spoil.
2. to impair or weaken the effectiveness of.
3. to debase; corrupt; pervert.
4. to make legally defective or invalid; invalidate: to vitiate a claim.

Now here's a word to conjure with!  I'd guess that most people outside the legal profession would assume some relationship with vital or vivacious giving the cognoscenti the ability to insult people to their face.   (This assumes, of course, that people are too lazy or embarrassed to look up or ask about a word they don't understand.)

When Genius Failed

As I was going through some things my father filed away, I came across some pages taken from the New York Times Book Review from September 24, 2000.  My guess is that he was attracted to Floyd Norris's review of"When Genius Failed" by Roger Lowenstein.  Although Floyd Norris, the NY Times' chief financial correspondent, was writing about "The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management" (the subtitle), his comments jump out as prescient:

It is far too early to know what the long-term lessons of the Long-Term saga will be. But it is clear that Wall Street has not learned much. Banks and hedge funds still use complicated derivatives to gain tremendous leverage, just as Long-Term did in placing its ill-fated bets in the stock market. ...

''Greenspan's more serious and longer-running error has been to consistently shrug off the need for regulation and better disclosure with regard to derivative products. Deluded as to the banks' ability to police themselves before the crisis, Greenspan called for a less burdensome regulatory regime barely six months after it.'' He complains that Greenspan has supported the banks in efforts to avoid making meaningful disclosures about their investments in derivatives.

It takes time, but seven years later we had Lehman Brothers, AIG, and the whole sub-prime mess making the scary Long-Term Capital Management fiasco pale by comparison.  As Norris said, there are limits to what academics can do for investors.

I was reminded of an academic discussing his analysis of eastern European's rocky transition from Communism to a market-driven economy.  His results indicated that a quick, painful dislocation produced the best results.  When asked if that is what he would recommend to national leaders, the professor, said that was what the data indicated, but, he was quick to add, he was not an official who would face the wrath of the populace whose life's savings and retirement benefits evaporated.

WNYC's Summer In the City Photos Document a Crime

WNYC, New York City's public radio station has a photos of summer in the city. One of the images (shown below) shows water bottles for sale. See the little red band on the water bottles? That's characteristic of bottles brought in from New Jersey which have no refundable deposit which, if I'm not mistaken means it is illegal to sell them in New York which requires a deposit for plastic water bottles.

I fantasize that there will be a first Amendment issue here when somebody tries to locate the seller by issuing a subpoena for Stephen Nessen, the photographer.

Leisure Dive

With the same fascination as cats in sink there is Leisure Dive, a web site showing pictures of people (mostly guys) in relaxed postures diving into pools.

The Sun or Where Else Would I Learn About Pastafaians?

Rupert Murdock's News of the World has ceased publication ostensible in response to the phone hacking scandal in Britain.  (Reporters hacked into phones of relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, impeded a murder investigation by deleting phone messages on a missing girl's phone leading police to believe the girl was still alive, and bribed security officials guarding Britain's royal family.) 

Fortunately the Sun is still publishing.  How else would I learn that Austria's Niko Alm successfully campaigned to be photographed for his Austrian driver's license with a pasta strainer on his head? Although an atheist, Alm claimed to be a Pastafarian, a devotee of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, their "only dogma is the rejection of dogma".

If Othodox Jews could wear a yarmulke despite Austria's proscription about head gear in the driver's license photo, why couldn't he wear a pasta strainer if it was part of his religious observance?

Makes sense to me.  (It's also a welcome relief from daily reports of bombing, assassinations, and squabbling politicians.)

61.5 Full-Time-Equivalent Positions

I thought I'd found another instance of public idiocy in the second paragraph of the story, "Washington State Shrinks IT Department’s Head Count" in Government Technology.  Was the Washington State Department of Information Services reducing their head count by 61.5 employees?  The image of the average family with 2.5 children flashed across my mind, with the attendant explanation by statistics profs that, no, the average family was not the result of an error in imitating Solomon's decision, but just the result of a mathematical calculation.

The department is cutting 61.5 full-time-equivalent positions from its 460-person work force, an opening salvo in further changes that will fundamentally alter the department’s future.

OK it's equivalents, not actual people.  The wait continues for a genuine example of a goof of this sort.

More Than A Quote From Edge of Darkness - A. O. Scott NY Times review

I just got around to reading the Weekend Arts section of the NY Times from a year and a half ago, January 20, 2010 to be precise.  The Mel Gibson vehicle, "Edge of Darkness" in which he plays a Boston detective investigating the murder of his daughter which

"involves showing up at various people’s houses and places of work, accosting them with brusque questions and, when all else fails, punching them in the face.

"All else fails quite a bit, which is of course why people buy tickets to a movie like this one."

Ah, that's why I keep old papers: discovering a turn of phrase or revelation which makes it worthwhile reading.  Worthwhile to whom?  To me to satisfy my narcissistic need for knowledge and to see all the stuff I missed while it was happening and things to add to my list.

The same issue had a number of article (Sundance Film Festival, a dance film festival, a performance at Joe's Pub) which left me with this to deal with:

• "The Last Train Home", a  documentary about the great New Years' migration  of 130 million Chinese trying to make it home for the Chinese New Year (and is available at my local library),
• a laudatory review of a performance by one time American Idol contestant, Jason Castro. (I got to check on his performance of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" on youtube,   Not watching TV with any regularity makes me a cultural fish out of water.  At the supermarket checkout I see that Laura is breaking up with Brad, Jennifer and Jason are back together, and see a teaser about revealing what start has cellulite. Who are these people?  Should I know this or can I skip to an alternate section of the test without penalty?)
• an enthusiastic review of a "surreal short 'Beguine'" (2009) by Douwe Dijkstra for which there was no reference in IMDB.com or any of the library catalogs to which I have access. 
  

  A man who has been having a good time is suddenly tipped, as if by an earthquake, into a vast red lake, on whose floor he quickly arrives. He keeps on falling. We see him go to work at an office, take his place at a desk, but then, when he goes to the copy machine, he tumbles right into it and lies there, as if in some pit, unseen by the next worker to use the machine.

  (This will now become something else to add to my list of obsessions.  I've discovered that a local library has a video tape of "Carnival in Flanders" so that quest may be put to rest.)  [Note added 10/8/2011 Beguine is online: http://vimeo.com/3435762.  I was looking for "Douwe Dijkstra" when I stumbled across photographs by someone with the same name.]
• "Night Catches Us" found in many local libraries, about Philadelphia  Black Panthers years after their glory days.  (I remember two things about attending an Angela Davis lecture about a year ago: 1) her cell phone went off in the middle of her talk, and 2) I couldn't understand what she was saying because of her casual use of coded words, meaningful to many in the audience, but not to me.   My background leads me to expect a speaker to define their terms at the beginning of a presentation because the speaker is not addressing cognoscenti.  Perhaps she expected she was.  In my case she wasn't.)

Take My Body Please

It's an Associated Press story about Robert George's unclaimed body in University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital.  The coroners in Fayette county where the hospital is located say the body should be handled by the coroner in Pulaski county where Mr. George lived.  The Pulaski county coroner says that possession is nine-tenth of the law, the body is the responsibility of Fayette county.  Relatives were contacted, but nothing has happened for 3 months.  The hospital asked a judge to decide.

There's plenty of humor to be mined here from the childish "He's yours"  "No, he's yours.  You had him last." to plays on the "Whose going to take uncle Robert now?" question which has become more common as medicine has extended our lifetimes.

Still, what does it mean that relatives won't claim a body.  Was he so disliked?  Is it just economic?  I got an insight into poverty in an NPR piece just before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans:  the reporter said that some people didn't have the money to get out of town.  How could that be?  Who could be so poor?  I can't remember whether it was bus fare, gasoline money, or transportation in general (packing up household goods and renting a truck), but to not have get-out-of-town money stunned me.

The dateline on the story is yesterday, so the questions about family will remain unknown unless it becomes fodder for a book, investigative journalism, or maybe it will show up in the court records after a judge chooses the lucky coroner.

With medical schools short of cadavers I would have thought that an enterprising school would contact the relatives to offer to take the body.  (Note to self: business idea: contract with medical schools as a cadaver finder.)

 Of course, the question of the body, the mortal remains, is one which has enthralled theologians and perplexed the rest of us.  There's the whole business of religious obligations/expectations.  I believe Orthodox Jews and Muslims want the body interred immediately.  Others put the body on display.  In some cases the display was to show that the deceased had not died as the result of foul play.

Cremation, which horrifies Muslims, is the preferred way for a lot of us.  (In a documentary about the famous folk group,The Weavers, Will Hayes joked that he used to sing about share croppers and now, referring to the neighbors who helped him with his garden, he said, "I have some myself."  Hayes ashes were interred in his compost pile.)

Years ago, the brother of an uncle buried his mother almost immediately.  The family felt that he was so quick about it because of a life-long animosity between the brother and his mother.  By all accounts the mother was a difficult personality.  When she died, he literally wanted to be rid of her.

I didn't understand it.  I liked my parents.  The drama of other family's was not ours: no screaming or yelling, chasing one another with knifes, smashing things, drunken rages, squealing tires, or mysterious disappearances.  Nope.  None of that.  We sulked and gave other hard or annoyed looks. You'll have to look else where for domestic drama inspiration.

It was only on experiencing how draining it is caring for people in long term decline that I got it.  Intellectually I understood it, but to get it I needed a closer association.  After many years, caring adult children, wishing no ill to their parents, are relieved when the parent finally die.  The trips to the hospital, the time coaxing parents to take medicine, act normal ("Please get dressed."  "Please take a bath."  "Tell me what hurts."), administering to physical needs, puts the rest of their life, the part that fills the pages of novels, in second place.

The grandchildren, the presumed center of the world, find the spotlight less constant, the parent/child in the middle faces a difficult balancing act for which there is no right solution.

Relief at the parent's death is compounded with guilt: should they have done things differently?  Could something have been done earlier?  In my family, putting off an elective surgical procedure contributed to an uncle's long decline.  After a time his general health precluded an operation and other related problems developed.

Blue or White? Believe the Text or the Image?

For no good reason I went to cars.com to look for a used Honda Civic. 

I tend to read which is why I noticed the mismatch between the description of the exterior color and the photograph.  (Of course, it could be something Orwellian: black is white, truth is fiction, or (your turn) _____ is _____ ).

I tried use the live chat feature to tell the used car dealer, but after a few minutes of "we'll be right with you" a message finally appeared telling me that they couldn't respond.  I have no doubt they were all home grilling and enjoying a tall frosty one, but I believe that years ago car dealers were open on the Fourth of July to "Deal.  Deal!  DEAL!!"

It is a commentary on our times left to the reader to interpret.

Some Quotes and Rock is Dead

From Nancy deWolf Smith's article, "Somebody Out There Hates Us" in the March 11th 2011 Wall Street Journal:

"In Housewivesland, dogs are small; kids are rude and on heroin or some other path to perdition; and men tend come [sic] in only a few basic models: control freak, leech, loser—or payer of alimony."

"Rock is dead.  Long live Paper and Scissors!" I wrote this on the back of an envelope.  A web search showed that it is a popular slogan on T-shirts (the first I found on a web search was on Zazzle), infant onesies, and a live journal blog by"sarasaloser".

 

"Obama has now fired more cruise missiles than all other Nobel Peace Prize winners combined."

A good witticism makes the rounds of the web.  

And here are some political quotes from the February 21, 2010 New York Times (yes, still behind in my reading):

"You can lead a man to Congress, but you cannot make him think." Milton Berle as quoted by Evan Bayh.

"Republicans lead in the wrong direction and Democrats are unable to lead in any direction at all." - Lincoln Chafee, a former Republican, but an independent at the time of the comment.

Krista Tippett paraphrasing part of a poem by Rilke, "the ephemeral nature of things is they're [sic] very fragrance." in an interview with Joanna Macy. (Transcript at http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2010/wild-love-for-world/transcript.shtml) 

subpoena duces tecum –noun Law a writ directing a person court to bring some document described in the writ.

Garage sale copy: "Boy meets girl...girl moves in....boy and girl have way too much stuff."

"I've seen better film on my teeth." - Berzerkirsrage (a comment on IMDB to the film Devil's Double before the film was officially released).

"I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger....then it hit me." -JohnT Fitzgerald (http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?127117-Biesemeyer-fence-versus-SS-T-Glide)

"You know, if talk was criminal, you'd lead a life of crime,
Because your mind is on vacation and your mouth is working overtime.
~Your Mind Is On Vacation",  Mose Allison

Woody Guthrie once said, “Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.”

Voltaire on medicine: "The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease." Maureen Dowd, NY Times 9/28/2011.

"Watched code never compiles." Maximilien on http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=4172152#xx4172152xx.

Mathematician's Survival Guide

"As long as algebra is taught in school, there will be prayer in school." Cokie Roberts

I stumbled across a ink to the "Mathematician's Survival Guide" on xameuel.com.  What was odd was that the post was a "reprint, with permission from the author, of Professor Peter Casazza’s brilliant article, “A Mathematician’s Survival Guide”. The preprint can be read in PDF form at Dr. Casazza’s own website, here. Not to be confused with a book by the same name by Professor Steven Krantz (the two professors together co-edited a book which is slated to appear soon, from the MAA, titled “The Psychology of the Mathematician”, where the present paper will appear)."

Why not just post a link with an endorsement?  Mine not to reason why.  I enjoyed reading about  mathematicians perception of others perception of them.

I stumbled around xameuel.com and discovered a post about a graphing program named GrafEq, which, according to the blogger handles equations which cause Mathematica to choke.  Here are two examples:

The author reasoned that the checkerboard graph probably represents  is probably very tightly oscillating waves. Seeing these makes me want to get back to mathematics.

Facial Recognition An App for for Locating Bar Action

AI has finally hit it's stride with a real world application:  SceneTap's app fcial recognition software will determine male/female ratios at bars to give heterosexuals not yet at the bar the information they need to know to increase their chance of hooking up with someone of the opposite sex.  For homosexuals the app may serve a similar purpose.  If the gender ratio is skewed so far in their direction, the app might as a gay/lesbian bar discovery app.

The story has been covered in sources from Discover magazine to Government Computing News.

Love and Other Torts: DA Sues Old Pal She Says Slept With Her Husband

I submit the first line of a June 29th AP story quoted in NY Lawyer as a fine example of pithy writing:

SMITHFIELD, N.C. (AP) — The Johnston County district attorney is suing her children's godmother and is seeking damages, saying the woman had sex with the prosecutor's husband.

The last line of the article states that the DA is seeking damages in excess of $10,000 and punitive damages in excess of $10,000.

There it is: almost everything you'd want to know.  For myself, someone who likes to do the math, I'm interested in the number of times the couple had sex so I can calculate a real dollar figure for the cost of sin.  (Yes, the wages of sin are death, but I assumed that was the final balloon payment.  I'm want to calculate the installment payments.)