Entries from September 2007 ↓

There you go again
So much better than last year.
Catch you in ‘08.

It’s small. It’s flat. It’s black. And according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, its numbers are shrinking. Welcome to the world of the hyphen. Having been around since at least the birth of printing, the hyphen is apparently enjoying a difficult time at the moment.

The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words, many of them two-word compound nouns. Fig-leaf is now fig leaf, pot-belly is now pot belly, pigeon-hole has finally achieved one word status as pigeonhole and leap-frog is feeling whole again as leapfrog.

The blame, as is so often the case, has been put at least in part on electronic communication. In our time-poor lifestyles, dominated by the dashed-off [or should that be dashed off or dashedoff] e-mail, we no longer have time to reach over to the hyphen key.

And English, being a language lacking any kind of governing body and instead relying on studies of usage, is changing to keep up.

Shorter OED editor Angus Stevenson doesn’t want anybody to get angry over the hyphen’s decline.

“We only reflect what people in general are reading. We have been tracking this for some time and we’ve been finding the hyphen is used less and less,” he says. “When you are sending e-mails, and you have to type pretty fast, on the whole it’s easier to type without hyphens. Ordinary people are not very conscious of the fact of whether they are putting hyphens or not.”

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:

fig leaf

hobby horse

ice cream

pin money

pot belly

test tube

water bed

Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:

bumblebee

chickpea

crybaby

leapfrog

logjam

lowlife

pigeonhole

touchline

waterborne

Source: BuzzFeed

So I’m sitting on my drum kit in the garage, as I do so often. It’s one of the best ways to spend some quality time alone. With nobody else here on the property, there’s just myself and the dogs. The garage is detached from the house, in the backyard, behind a locked gate. My kingdom.

From where I sit behind the kit, the large garage door is to my right. I’m facing another door directly across from me on the opposite wall. It’s a conventional industrial steel external door, with a knob and dead bolt. Both this door and the large garage door are closed, with just me in the garage. The dogs are outside. A typical scenario.

I’m losing myself in my groove, finding the zone, staring straight ahead at the steel door. To my surprise, the knob turns, and the door begins swinging inward into the garage. Now, I’m thinking, what’s happening here? There can’t be anybody on the property. Unless one of the dogs has learned how to turn a doorknob, somebody has trespassed onto my property and is walking in on me. Yet as startled as I was, I didn’t stop playing. I never missed a beat. It’s like my brain was surprised, but my limbs were on cruise control.

The door slowly swings open to reveal somebody standing there. Somebody whose face I know. Somebody I haven’t known long. We exchanged smiles.

Then I woke up.

An ad for British illusionist T. Elder Hearn. His likeness appears in the scene.

“A pleasant illusion is better than a harsh reality.”
–Christian Nevell Bovee

Click each image for a larger version

=continued=

Somebody has compiled a list of questions Google apparently throws at its interviewees. I’m down with that game. Let’s see what happens.

1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

Normal bus or short bus?

2. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

Probably Twitter it.

3. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

Twice as much.

4. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?

Ask its mother.

5. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

You know your daddy? How he knows everything? It’s kinda like that.

6. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

23.

7. You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?

Redefine my location as B and believe.

8. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?

Care less about which specific shirt I grab and move on. I did that this morning.

9. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?

All the guys jump on the next JetBlue flight to Vegas.

10. In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

Approximately two girls to one guy. Where is this place? No, wait. It’s two guys to a girl. Remind me never to visit.

11. If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?

0.317

12. If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)

7.5 degrees.

13. Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it’s only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?

1 and 2 go first. Two minutes. 1 comes back with the flashlight, hands it to 5 and 10. Three minutes. 5 and 10 cross, handing the flashlight to 2. Thirteen minutes. 2 crosses. Fifteen minutes. 2 and 1 return. Seventeen minutes.

14. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. Your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. Would you accept the wager?

Only if Neil Diamond, Sharon Tate, Mary Lou Retton, Natassja Kinski, Warren Zevon, Ernest Borgnine, and my buddy Paulie were there.

15. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

All of them.

16. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?

Put three balls on each side. First shot. If it’s even, weigh the remaining two and you’re golden. If it’s off, things start getting complicated.

17. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)

Pirate 5 proposes that he gets 98 coins, with Pirate 4 and Pirate 3 getting a coin each. Pirate 4 and Pirate 3 must realize they should comply, else end up with nothing.

Do you still think you have what it takes to work for Google?

I’m feeling lucky.

There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must”, then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes a great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty. Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sound - wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. And if out of this turning within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. You will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to, the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

From “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke

“An art book is a museum without walls.”
–Andre Malraux

Hell yes. Tool’s Lateralus analyzed and put into the context of the Fibonacci sequence. Or vice-versa. It’s always nice to receive confirmation that you’re not the only one who’s completely insane.