Form vs. Function

Language Log has an inspirational post about politics, presidential phrasing, and "prescriptivist poppycock".

I won't have to pee again for a week now.

Quote of the day

In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

New Yorker

I'm guessing this subsidizes the padded bra manufacturers....

This is actually supposed to be a safety measure.

"Klingon Urethra Gutting Device"

Actually, it's a spaghetti fork.

The next crisis....

It's probably not a good idea to take your financial advice from a cartoonist, but here Dilbert's Scott Adams speculates about the next big ripoff.

I freaked out and cried when my mom went shopping for a cute pink skirt....

Yup, that's what my titles would probably look like if I were a woman blogger, at least according to this table of word frequencies by sex. You know, actually it DOESN'T read like my typical title.

On the other hand, I've never blogged about "gb", whatever the hell that is.

Constructive Criticism....

"Stimulus" spending has been in the news lately (seems to me like the crisis has yet to appear that can't be simply solved by the politicians spending more of our money!), but I did not realize the Japanese have been outdoing us all along: apparently Japan spends "three to four times more than what the United States, with twenty times the land area and more than double the population" spends on construction.

Lasered fighting woman ...

Nope, this is not a B movie. We've known that those lovely white statues from antiquity were originally painted, and we have just found an actual example (head of an Amazon warrior) in Herculaneum.

The video here shows how it is laser scanned to capture the geometry.

HT Archaeoblog

Common Writing mistakes...

... are humorously summarized here.

They are self-illustrative: "Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors."

Hat tip: Volokh

OK, Pumpkinhead!

This is too weird NOT to point out.

We all want our kids to go to college....

...but Coyote makes a good argument that this is not always wise.

Back when I was still in Germany, there were 3 tracks in education: Volksschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium. You were routed to one of these tracks based on a test you took in 4th grade. Maybe this is a bit early to decide the rest of your life (actually, this was not final, there ARE ways of switching tracks), and Germany has abandoned this system, but it did have its advantages.

Volksschule was for the worker bees. School was only mandatory until you were 14 years old (plenty of time to get a grounding in literacy, math, and civics), and then you were expected to move on. This didn't mean your education was OVER - typically you moved into an apprenticeship that prepared you for a trade.

Gymnasium was a college preparatory school, and the track you took if you wanted to be a teacher, a college professor, a doctor, various highly respected professions.

Realschule I don't really understand that well, but apparently it was a middle ground between the two.

This satisfied both an egalitarian ideology (everybody had the same fundamental first four years of schooling, everybody had a chance at ANY of the tracks) without forcing everybody to sacrifice a large part of their life on preparation they did not want - in the American system there is no way these days to opt out before you are 22 without being labeled in some way a failure.

In Germany, a kid who attended Volksschule and went on to become a Master at his trade was STILL a highly respected person (qualified to lead and teach others - my own father was a Master in 2 different trades (metalworking/plumbing and heating/cooling) and an advanced Journeyman in one other (electrician) although he never finished Volksschule) with no history of failure behind him, even though the respect was of a different flavor from that accorded an intellectual.

In retrospect, I mourn the demise of that system. It should have been improved rather than abandoned.

Finding out you are fired....

This post has some amusing horror stories. My personal favorite:

I walked into the employee's entrance of my building and the security guard said: "Visitors must use the main entrance."

So I had to walk around to the front, trade my (deactivated) employee badge for a visitor's badge, and then walk up to my office to clear out my personal effects - for which the cleaning guy had thoughtfully left a couple black plastic trash bags.

More here. Fortunately, all my horror stories are about the actual work, not the firing.

Quote of the day

The best form of welfare for the troops is first-rate training.
- Rommel

Kissing rules....

I didn't realize it was that formal, but apparently every social group has rules for greeting kisses (as opposed to actual smooching), and sometimes these change. Some of the comments to that post were funny, such as the one speculating on where exactly in a "3 cheek kiss" the third cheek would be.

Careful study of these customs might inform you of where to travel for the maximum number of kisses.

Quote of the day

What about that guy who set up the phony investment company? Can the Treasury make a new one of those, only bigger? He took money away from people and gave it to charities and the needy and the arts and higher education. That sounds like stimulus so why are we sending him to jail? Wasn't he ahead of the curve?

"Tyrone"

Now that it's too late for anybody to get this for ME....

...I can point you to this example of how gift giving can be a form of performance art.



Hat tip: McArdle

Eternal Burning Questions

Such as "Can a Jedi lightsaber cut through Superman?"

(The answer, by the way, appears to be "No" - or at least a convincing argument can be made to support that view.)

Hat Tip? The appropriately named Geek Press.

They need to find a way to plug my fat STRAIGHT into the car....

....instead of only getting it through liposuction. Yes, liposuction fat has been used as fuel for vehicles.

I guess the low tech version of this is called the bicycle.

Statistical Innumeracy

Megan McArdle points out another example of journalists' incompetence with statistics. They reported "Holiday jewelry sales drop 80 percent" when actually 80% of jewelry stores reported some drop in sales.

The Language Log has quite a few examples of the way journalists misreport and distort statistics and science. I guess if they understood this sort of thing, they'd find other jobs.

The Truth Shall Set You Free

...and if you don't want to be faced with the wrong kind of truth, have I got the source for you! Conservapedia is prepared to summarize the facts as well as Wikipedia, while warning you about dangerous myths.

For example, who knew about the dangerous association between liberalism and evolution?

In regards to the theory of evolution and liberalism, in the United States, CBS News reported in October of 2005 that the Americans most likely to believe only in the theory of evolution are liberals.[212]
“ The CBS News reported the following:

Americans most likely to believe in only evolution are liberals (36 percent), those who rarely or never attend religious services (25 percent), and those with a college degree or higher (24 percent).

White evangelicals (77 percent), weekly churchgoers (74 percent) and conservatives (64 percent), are mostly likely to say God created humans in their present form.[213]
”

Given that liberalism is so prevalent in academia, it is not entirely surprising that college graduates are indoctrinated into the evolutionary paradigm via evolutionary propaganda.

Or how evolution might affect your views on homosexuality?

Also, according to atheist philosopher David Stove the theory of evolution was influential in regards to the sexual revolution.[205] An individual's view regarding the theory of evolution may also affect one's view regarding homosexuality. For example, Creation Ministries International states:
“ Homosexual acts go against God’s original design of a man and a woman becoming one flesh — see Genesis 1 and 2, endorsed by Jesus Himself in Matthew 19:3–6.[206]