Idiotprogrammer

TRIVIA QUESTION: can you name the author of a sci fi novel in verse who won a Nobel Prize for Literature….because he served on the Nobel prize committee? And killed himself 4 years later? I’ll give you 2 hints: 1)he shared it with somebody else, 2)during the year he won, Graham Greene and Nabokov were considered to be the year’s favorites.

The answer is listed somewhere on this page.

Here’s a great mp3 by Martha Nussbaum on desire, passions and Hellenistic philosophy.  An excerpt from the transcript (same link):

Interviewer: There’s an Epicurean doctrine regarding death which finds perhaps its fullest exposition in Latin in the work of Lucretius. It goes like this, ‘It is irrational to fear that which we will not experience, death being non-existent, cannot in the nature of things be experienced, therefore it is irrational to fear death.’ I have to ask, is this really therapeutic? Are we really meant to be comforted by this?

Martha Nussbaum: You know, the first thing that Lucretius felt he had to do before he could comfort you, is to prove that there’s no afterlife. So before we get to the argument you’re talking about, there’s a whole long series of proofs of the mortality of the soul, because he thought that what most people are afraid of is being tormented in the afterlife. And so then once we get rid of the afterlife, then we still have people thinking that they fear death, and he thinks he can convince them that this fear is based on an irrational imagining that you are surviving yourself. So he thinks you’re standing there in your mind, watching the dead you and thinking ‘Oh, poor dead you, you’re missing all the good things of life.’ And so he thinks that if you can point out to the person it’s quite irrational, there’s no spectators gonna be there, there’s just nothing at all, then that will take away the fear.

At that time, people were just as divided as they are now and I’ve had a terrific argument about that recently in our law school at the University of Chicago, because I had a new paper on that topic. And you know, you can see that some people find this argument very appealing. If there’s nothing at all, well then it would be quite irrational to think that that’s a bad that’s happened to you. But because there’s no you there for whom something bad could happen.

Other people think differently and at the time people thought differently and at the time, people thought differently. Plutarch wrote a whole treatise talking about how bad this argument was. And I think to me, the way of attacking the argument has to be to think about what makes life worthwhile, and I think what makes life worthwhile are activities that have a structure, that persist through time, that go on into the future. And what death does is, it cuts off those activities and so it changes their shape so to speak, it’s like making them empty and vain because they never reach a completion, and it’s for that reason that even though there’s no you, it changes what you were in your life, if you see what I mean.

That is, suppose you’re in the middle of trying to build some elaborate structure that you attack great importance to you, and then put all your energy into that and put your time into that, you get your friends to help you, and in the middle of that before your thing is complete, you die, well then it’s not just the time after death that’s the bad thing, it’s what it’s done to the life, it cuts it off in the middle. Now I think what that shows is not that every death is bad, but that death would be bad whenever it does that, whenever it cuts off activities that are in the middle and people are still attaching value to their completion.

Here’s a terrific book review essay Nussbaum wrote about a book on romantic love and sexual politics. (The book being reviewed was Vindication of Love:
Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century By Cristina Nehring). Let me say that this is one of the most thoughtful (yet devastating )  reviews of a nonfiction title I have ever read. Here’s the meat of her philosophical disagreement (pardon the length):

But, says Nehring, love thrives on inequality. Here, of course, we have the two-theses problem. The first says, wisely, that real love should be prepared to overcome inequalities of power, class, and station. (That is the plot of more or less every Victorian novel.) The second says, foolishly, that real love requires inequality of power, class, and station. So confused is Nehring at this point that she interprets Pride and Prejudice as confirmation of her second thesis rather than her first: it shows, she says, that people always eroticize class difference and would never love people of similar station. What a trivialization of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy! Their deep moral and intellectual affinity, and their strong romantic attraction, gradually manage to surmount the obstacles imposed by rigid social norms and the internal dispositions (prejudice and pride) that they engender. It is true that there would be no novel without the distance: after all, there has to be a plot. It seems obviously untrue, however, that there would be no love without the distance. Far from social distance being eroticized, it is, until late in the novel, a source of erotic blindness. At this point Nehring’s argument loses all clarity, as, seeking confirmation for her anti-feminist thesis, she begins to treat any qualitative difference at all as “inequality”: the very fact of heterosexuality, she now says, shows that sexual desire thrives on inequality.

But does passion even require qualitative difference? Here Nehring appears to endorse a view of sexual attraction that Roger Scruton popularized some time ago in his book Sexual Desire. Really valuable sexual passion, Scruton said, requires qualitative differences between the parties, because sexual love, when valuable, involves a kind of risky exploration of strange terrain, and we should think less well of those who stick to the familiar. Scruton could not advance this claim as a descriptive thesis about sexual choices, for nothing is more obvious than that people tend to choose people close to themselves in all sorts of ways–religion, class, education. But he did put it forward as a normative claim, and he used it to argue that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality, because it involves greater adventure and risk. Something like this is probably what Nehring has in mind, although she has no disdain for same-sex passion.

What should we think of this? Do people who choose qualitatively similar partners really lack courage? The most obvious problem with Scruton’s thesis was that it was capriciously and inconstantly applied: to sexual orientation, but not to romances between adults and children, between Protestants and Catholics, between the virtuous and the immoral. A more subtle problem with his argument is that it is not even clear how it could be assessed: for, as the philosopher Nelson Goodman showed in his great essay “Seven Strictures on Similarity,” the concept of similarity is so slippery that it has basically no content. Any two things are similar and dissimilar to one another in manifold respects.

But the real problem with Scruton–and Nehring, who speaks, Scruton-like, of the “enigmatic Other”–is that they both mislocate erotic risk. What is risky is not getting in touch with some trait that is dissimilar to some trait of one’s own. It is the whole idea of becoming vulnerable to an inner life that one cannot see and can never control. It is not qualitative difference, but the sheer separateness of the other person, the idea of an independent source of vision and will, that makes real love an adventure in generosity–or, if one is like Proust’s narrator, a source of mad jealousy and destructive projects of domination and control. And this has nothing at all to do with class difference, or gender difference, or even temperamental difference. It has to do only with the fact of human individuation–that minds and bodies never merge, that intimacy is not a fusion but a conversation.

There is a grain of truth in Nehring’s thesis about personal qualities: it is at least plausible to maintain that loving someone who is complicated, opaque, and in some respects concealed can be of particular interest or value. At any rate, we often think less well of people who are willing to love only people who are altogether obvious and lacking in complexity. Rightly or wrongly, we think that such lovers are refusing some challenge, or lacking in curiosity. And yet an erotic attraction to psychological complexity does not require pursuing class difference, career difference, power difference, or some other obvious kind of difference. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how one could ever pursue a relationship with persons as complicated as some of the artists and writers adduced by Nehring without a context of shared activities, commitments, or aspirations that would generate the kind of friendship and openness that make insight into another person’s complexities possible. The way she tells the stories of those complicated artists and writers, they understood this well.

I plan to read both Nehring’s book as well as Nussbaum’s book on Hellenistic philosophy and desire. (see a thorough review of it here by John T. Kirby). I definitely will report back.

As an aside, let me say that Nussbaum’s tone throughout the essay is a tad condescending but still respectful. She seems to be criticizing the author’s naiveté rather than the ideas themselves (as though Nussbaum herself had considered most of those ideas already, but had discarded them.

That said, I have to admit that Nussbaum’s book has sparked my interest in the two thinkers she criticizes.  I’d heard of Roger Scruton before, and his Sexual desire: a philosophical investigation sounds provocative at the very least. So do his other books: Beauty, Death-Devoted Heart, etc.  (Here’s a website of his published essays. He’s a resident scholar for AEI and has published lots of articles on various online journals and mp3 lectures). 

I like the idea that thinkers like Scruton and Nussbaum are able to write so generally. Of course, they rest at comfortable academic positions, and that must certainly help. But even tenured professors tend to write about their niche without addressing the world at large. I guess philosophers by definition need to be relevant and comprehensible (and so do writers).  It always is interesting when an academic type tries his hand at a book in a totally different field. With a complex subject like climate change, a generalist approach can render your arguments laughable, but in other fields. the cross-pollination is fruitful. What if a priest wrote a treatise on prestidigitation? Or a surgeon wrote a book about classical dance? Or a comedian wrote about Civil War slave owners?  The outsider can uncover assumptions which were never questioned by those in the field. I think I shall write a book about musicology.

Fascinating interview with Romanian writer Dumitru Tsepeneag:

AJ: In a previous interview you gave for CONTEXT magazine, you compared your book Vain Art of the Fugue, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2007, to a musical fugue, to a canon for two voices, and by doing so you were referring to a musical structure that always influences the formal structure of your novels. In Pigeon Post, the narrator claims that “music and chess are the lifeblood of [his] literature.” Could you first explain the difference of the influence of music in Vain Art of the Fugue and in Pigeon Post, and then explain your specific double-sided interest for music and chess? How are they related to each other?

DT: In the French text, the word used for lifeblood is “breast,” as in: “music and chess are the two nourishing breasts of my literature.” Breasts are linked to their owner—or to the author, as in the already conventional metaphor used by Tiresias—by the rest of the body, mostly by the head. One of the breasts usually is larger than the other—or in this case, more important than the other. For instance, music—the mother of all arts, the origin of European art. Music is important because it creates pure structure. The tune, or melody, is but a pretext.

Chess is all about structures too: the winner of the game is the one who finds the best structure on the chessboard. To checkmate one’s opponent is to impose one final structure to them. A resigned death
. . . You lay your king down on the board, accept its defeat, but the king does not die. The defeated player can play another chess game.

The player is indeed not king. He is, just as an author, but the puppeteer who pulls the strings behind the scenes. He thinks he is immortal, which is of course the height of irony . . .

The overall model or structure for music and chess all the same is still the act of dreaming. Nighttime dreaming, which is quickly forgotten about. When one wakes up, the memory of the dream slowly fades away. It’s just like listening to music. In order to make sense out of a dream, it’s necessary to piece things back together, to interpret. This is the case for music too, of course.

What about chess? When you think about it, chess can be compared to dreaming too. If you want to win a chess game, you must decipher your opponent’s every move, his secret, malicious, lethal intentions. It’s a lot of work! Beyond mere appearances, the “latent content” is very significant, even though it was subjected to a certain abstraction.

One can write down every move in a chess game, but the result would only be the outlines of the subject matter and would exclude what went on in the players’ minds during the game.

Vain Art of the Fugue is more obviously structured by music: a canon for two voices, as you would say. Or more precisely, rectus and inversus: the theme takes one step ahead and then one step back and so on. The theme is impeded by pitfalls and traps that account for the movement.

Pigeon Post’s case is slightly more complex. At first sight, one is reminded of Flaubert’s project of a “book about nothing.” But Pigeon Post deals more with the rejection of a preconceived subject matter, and with the submission to music, seen as a nutrient, as lifeblood. It’s not a submission to classical music, but to atonal music, which bears the seeds of the end: the end of music, of art in general.

What else to say?

The fragmented structure of my text plays a great role. One can speak of “thematic cells,” which correspond in literature to what I call, somewhere else, “the shadow of a theme, ectoplasms of things and beings.” I also refer to Boulez there. But I’m also referring to the wizard in this fragment, Webern. But please don’t lure me into pedantry—that is, analyzing my own texts.

I would like to add one last thing. There isn’t such a thing as a subject matter that exists before the text is being written; however, after a few pages, a quantity of subjects are being suggested, one by one, and several different stories and anecdotes intermingle and mix like a pigeon in flight; among those pigeons are carrier pigeons that carry not just one but several messages; once put together, those ill-assorted messages claim the death of a certain kind of literature: the literature that still harbors the illusion that it can endlessly replenish itself.

Here is the 2009 voters guide put out by the  League of Women Voters.  It’s a PDF and easily hidden on the League website. Incompetence!

Chronicle Endorsements are here.

David Letterman gives the top 10 presidential moments of George W. Bush.

Here’s Letterman whining (and I do mean whining ) when John McCain cancelled an appearance.

It’s funny how they have let Letterman become more political and opinionated over the past couple of years.

(Personville will be the name of a literary magazine I’ll be starting).

Ever since I wrote my article about the importance of a good vocabulary, I’ve been looking for ways to help my 8 year old nephew and 10 year old niece learn new words. Here are some things I’ve found.

By far, the most interesting thing I’ve found for children is the interactive vocabulary game from Big IQ for Kids. Kids choose a level, and then the website will talk to him about the word and ask them to follow a series of steps about the word. Each level has 10 words, and after a kid finishes, they win a credit to play a game.  BigIQ has free and paid memberships for their various learning activities, but the free membership is adequate.  Almost as good as the vocabulary game is a list of all the words kids learn in the game. It is divided into these levels: 2nd/3rd level words, 3rd/4th level words, 5th/6th level words, PSAT words and SAT words. In other words, enough for just about any student.

I woke up at 4:00 AM in the morning determined to write a storm of fiction. Instead I end up catching on some random blogs! Time is a-wastin.

Ok, let me get it out of the way. (Hey, it’s my birthday now).

I really enjoy satirical blogs and don’t hype them enough.

IOZ Interviews Malcolm Gladwell:

IOZ: Malcolm, what is your new book about?
MG: Well, IOZ, it’s about how when you call across a room, street, or open outdoor area to someone who hasn’t previously noticed you, they will hear you and become aware of your presence. This is really a remarkable phenomenon, but much of the newest research has yet to be written about for a general audience. I got the idea one day when I was in Manhattan. I was on Bleeker, and suddenly someone called, "Hey!" Before that, I hadn’t known he was there. Afterward, I did. So I started to ask myself, what goes on in that moment. What is the real story there? In a broader sense, it is a book about what it means to be human.
IOZ: Heady stuff, no doubt. But Malcolm, won’t some people say, oh, that is just glib repackaging of a totally banal and widely appreciated fundamental of everyday, lived experience?
MG: They might, but they would be misunderstanding the central idea of the book. You see, this isn’t a story that’s been told before. It isn’t about hearing, or voice recognition, or the habits of human public interaction. Those stories have been told before. This is really a story about an idea.

Fafblog on the Iranian threat:

Q: Is Iran a threat?
A: Oh yes. Even as we speak Iran is potentially starting the beginnings of a very possibly quite almost-real hypothetically nuclear weapons program!
Q: Oh no! How many nuclear weapons does Iran already have?
A: Counting warheads, ICBMs, mid- and long-range missiles, ABMs, tactical nukes, bunker-busters and submarine-based weaponry, the full nuclear arsenal of Iran at this moment is very rapidly just beginning to quite possibly approach a number just short of one!
Q: That makes them almost as deadly as the rogue nation of Whoville or the Islamic Republic of Candyland!
A: And they could be just months away from an actual bomb!
Q: But they’ve been just months away from a bomb for years now.
A: I know! Which means in terror years, Iran already has a bomb… in your child’s precious brain!
Q: But that’s where she keeps her sugarplum dreams!
A: That’s why it’s up to us to already have being stopped them!
Q: What will Iran do with nuclear weapons?
A: Terrible things. For a start, it will have them.
Q: Oh no!
A: And once it has them, it can threaten to use them, if anyone else tries to use them on them.
Q: There would be no defense against their self-defense.
A: They pose an existential threat to our ability to existentially threaten them.

A more caustic critique of Israeli’s military adventurism:

Israel’s critics will forever bicker over the spilled milk of Israeli policy – a few thousand homes demolished here, a few thousand corpses over there – but we must allow that Israel has a right to defend itself, and we must also allow that defending itself necessarily entails the indiscriminate bombing of thousands of screaming refugees. After all, if an implacable terrorist enemy had been launching rockets at one of your villages, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to stop them? And once those same implacable terrorist enemies agreed to a cease-fire, wouldn’t you break that cease-fire by bombing them and their families, reasoning that they are, after all, implacable terrorist enemies, and not to be trusted? And when you went to bomb those terrorists and their families, wouldn’t you also bomb everyone and everything around them, reasoning that only a terrorist would live near, go to school with, or be hospitalized in the same vicinity as a terrorist? And when you went to bomb everything around them, wouldn’t you be sure to plan that bombing months before the event that nominally precipitated it? And before planning that massive bombing campaign, wouldn’t you be sure to cut the entire population off from terrorist food, militant medicine, and jihadist electricity for months in advance? And when that population retaliated against your pre-retaliation retaliation by launching rockets at one of your villages, wouldn’t that merely confirm their nature as implacable terrorist enemies who must be destroyed at any cost?

This satire might require an explanation. Some wingnuts were gloating  over some emails which “prove” that climate scientists have been lying to us all the time. Never mind the fact that stealing emails is illegal and desperate. Carbonfixated has the dirt on the damning correspondence between Newton and Leibniz!

If you own any shares in companies that produce reflecting telescopes, use differential and integral calculus, or rely on the laws of motion, I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the calculus myth has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after volumes of Newton’s private correspondence were compiled and published.

When you read some of these letters, you realise just why Newton and his collaborators might have preferred to keep them confidential. This scandal could well be the biggest in Renaissance science. These alleged letters – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists behind really hard math lessons – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in covering up the truth, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

But perhaps the most damaging revelations are those concerning the way these math nerd scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence to support their cause.

Facebook humor:

Jared Spool on Revealing Design Treasures on Amazon.com. If you want, you can just click through the slides to get an idea what is going on, but Spool is a dynamite speaker. I attended a conference he put on in 2000 where he talked about the number of people who mistakenly bought tickets online for Disneyland when they actually had intended to go to Disneyworld.

Ok, a quiz. Can you guess who made this statement?

I am not going to discuss now whether we did the right thing by going there. But it is a fact that we went there absolutely not knowing the psychology of the people, or the real situation in the country. And everything that we were and are doing in Afghanistan is inconsistent with the moral face of our country.

(The answer is here).

Comic Jon Hodgeman asks in a 14 minute video if  Obama is really a nerd.  Entertaining.

Christopher Beam compiles an index of Sarah Palin’s new book. I’m no fan of Palin, but at the supermarket I found myself salivating over Palin’s Runner’s World cover picture – which also went on the cover of Newsweek.

David Pogue on deliberately comical Amazon reviews. See the UFO-02 Detector, the Mountain Men 3 Wolf T-shirt, Tuscan Whole Milk.

Oh, f—-. My browser just crashed. (I was just thinking to myself, it’s a good thing my Firefox browser hasn’t crashed; I have a lot of windows open which I need to get to). Thanks, firefox.

Egad, there’s no need to cuss. It’s just a browser; it’s not as if anyone has died or a comet is about to hit the earth.  I’ve started to take pride in avoiding profanity. I’m not a prude about profanity; but it becomes dull very quickly. 

Meanwhile, let’s consult Samuel Beckett:

(Here’s something similar, mercifully shorter).

Here are two major pieces I wrote about green web hosting and data centers. I actually spent a lot of time researching this. I’ll repost it on this blog eventually, but for now I recommend that you read it on the Houston Chronicle website and leave your comments there. (don’t worry; I’ll read them).

• Part 1 talks about how to figure out the carbon footprint of your webhosting service.
• Part 2 talks about how data centers are trying to reduce their energy consumption and how the EPA is establishing a new Energy Star standard.

Thanks to Dwight Silverman at Techblog for running the article and to all the people who gave me good information and assistance. It’s funny; although I now know a lot about the subject, when I started, I knew next to nothing. Also, I fully expect to receive even more information and analysis after the article. (I now see some glaring typos – ouch!) The act of writing an article and reading the reactions can teach you a lot.

Here are some addendums and afterthoughts to the article. I’ll be adding more to the list over time.

1. Rocky Mountain Power changed their URLs before the article went live, so the graphic is no longer on their page. Here’s another graphic from Pacificorp website about their energy mix. It comes from their 2008 Integrated Resource Plan (PDF) on page 74.
2. As a general observation, let me say it is absolutely maddening to figure out the energy mix of electric utilities anywhere. The Texas Power to Choose site is head and shoulders above anything I’ve seen so far.
3. Some commenters have already argued that the green label is too expensive for Internet services and energy companies. I can’t speak for all cases, but the interesting point I found is that the prices of  green hosting plans are comparable to regular hosting plans. I also found that the cost of green energy in my zip code is comparable to a traditional energy mix.

Texans bear a special responsibility for the problem of climate change. Texas emits so much carbon that if it were a nation, it would be the 7th largest emitter of carbon in the world. China’s per capita carbon emissions is 5.5 metric tons per person; the US per capita carbon emissions is 23.5 metric tons per person. Texas per capita carbon emissions is 27.9 metric tons per person. Texas overwhelmingly emits more carbon than any state in the US by a longshot.  676 million metric tons, vs. 402 million metric tons for California (even though California has 35 million people and Texas has 24 million people). In other words, Texas is Ground Zero for this impending climate change disaster.

However, there are fairly easy steps you can take to minimize your carbon footprint. The first and most important step is to switch power companies to a 100% renewable source or to request that your electric company put you on a windpower plan. In Houston and Dallas, the price of 100% renewable energy plans on www.powertochoose.org are comparable to the typical energy plans (which involve a mix of coal and natural gas). At worst, the cost of 100% renewable energy plans are 5% more expensive than nonrenewable plans. In San Antonio (which has a city utility which provides electricity), the cost of 100% windpower is about 10-15% more expensive than the coal/natural gas/nuclear.

Starting on January,  2010, I have decided to be completely carbon neutral — that means to make my net carbon emissions to be zero. I will accomplish this with certain lifestyle changes — which I do NOT expect to disrupt my lifestyle in any major way –  and purchase carbon offsets on the free market to compensate for the carbon I have used  (with my car for example). I know the criticisms of carbon offsets — I have done my research, and I know how to purchase carbon offsets intelligently. Anyway, we ought to start placing a price on carbon; that is simply making polluters to pay the true cost that their pollution has on the environment.

Deciding to be carbon neutral means being more aware of the impact of your lifestyle choices. What is the carbon footprint of driving a car or eating a hamburger or flying to another state or ordering online? I’m quickly learning that to be carbon neutral, you need to be a good accountant; you need to keep good records (and I plan to keep my records on a Google Docs spreadsheet). I will try to describe my progress towards attaining this goal on my weblog — as well as the challenges.

In school  I amassed quite a   vocabulary. I was reading voraciously and preparing for the SAT and GRE tests. In high school I had studied Latin, so it was easy for me to recognize Latin etymology.  After graduating,  I worked  for the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation, an educational  testing foundation that  gave people career advice and coached people to work on improving their vocabulary.  When I worked there, I used to give a 15-20 minute “exhortation” about the benefits of improving English vocabulary.   Here were some key points:

• According to internal surveys, the profession with the highest vocabulary was not editor or college professor, but business executive. My colleagues at Johnson O’Connor came up with various  theories to explain this:  1)executives  rise in their field because they were better able to communicate their ideas to peers; 2)execs are incredibly well-read people and vocabulary is a sign of that; 3)execs need  a precise understanding of what their underlings are telling them, and vocabulary helps that;  4)having a strong vocabulary makes it easier to acquire new knowledge, and that is a key part of being a good manager; 5)having a strong vocabulary is  a result of  a strong educational background and signals to others that you are educated  (regardless of whether it was actually true);  and 6)a strong vocabulary was a sign that a person has a lot of outside interests and a healthy curiosity about the world.   We never  agreed on which explanation was more valid, but the correlation was undeniable.
• Contrary to what one might think, hard  words are everywhere; you don’t have to read Melville or Dickens to boost your vocabulary.  At Johnson O’Connor I had a trick where I would ask the low-vocabulary student  what magazine he or she liked to look at. They would usually mention People or Seventeen  or Time or Cosmo or Sports Illustrated, and I would pull out copies of whichever magazine they mentioned (I kept about 10-12 issues under my desk). I would show them all the hard words from the magazine they named  (with the hard words highlighted in red).  For the clients who mentioned People magazine, I always pointed out the word chanteuse which nobody had heard of (unless they had studied French).   The kind of things you read doesn’t matter as much as the fact you are noticing words you don’t know.      People are generally good at figuring out the overall meaning of a sentence without knowing the meaning of a single word. Or so they think. In fact, they may not be aware of how much meaning is being missed  until it is pointed out to them.
• Learning new words is a onetime deal.  Yes, it requires work,  but once you get these words under your belt, it requires little effort to retain this  understanding. I used to distinguish between active vocabulary and passive vocabulary. Active vocabulary is simply the words which you are able to use freely. For me as a writer it helps to use all kinds of fancy words (words are the tools of thought), but in fact, a passive vocabulary may be sufficient for career success. I used George H.W. Bush (the father) as an example. He was famous as a bad (and awkward) communicator, but most people still  thought he was sharp. He may not have been able to use the word eleemosynary in everyday conversation, but  if one of his advisors used the word, he would know what it meant (or  make sure he found out).
• Before you can actually learn a word, it helps to be aware of it. When reading  magazines, people merrily read past these words without  noticing them or  stopping to wonder what they meant. Often in conversation you can be oblivious to a word or even mistake it for a word that sounds the same. On Star Trek, the captain of Enterprise Captain Jean Luc Picard used to say “Belay that order.” Before I knew the meaning of belay, I just assumed that the word being said was delay. Once I realized it was an entirely different word, I looked it up and discovered it had a totally different connotation. (It does not mean delay; it means to stop indefinitely!) Suddenly, the Star Trek dialogue had different meanings (did you notice all the nautical words being bandied about?)
• Often words begin with a concrete meaning in a specialized subject area and only later assumes a more general and metaphorical meaning. Let’s look at that same word belay again. In fact, belay is a specialized word used in mountain climbing which refers to fastening a rope to a stationary object like a rock and using it for security.  (Rock climbers probably know this already). One secret to learning words permanently is to learn the specialized meaning of the word in the first place; if you do, it becomes easier to understand the general ways in which it can be used (such as in Star Trek).
• It is possible to arrange words in order of difficulty; and if you are going to start learning words, it is more effective to learn the easier words first.  (Johnson O’Connor used to rank words by difficulty and sell word books which grouped words at approximately the same level of  difficulty). Practically speaking though, this means that words you encounter in your normal day tend to be  easier to learn than random words in the dictionary. That’s why  word-of-the-day calendars or word-of-the-day emails rarely do much good. The words are usually beyond your realm of “learnability.” You can try to learn this word, but chances are that this word will not “stick.” 
• Following the premise that easier words are learned more quickly than hard words, it makes sense to pay extra  attention to words already familiar to you  than  constantly trying to add new and unfamiliar words.  It is easy to confuse familiarity with actual understanding.  Often, when you are at the verge of adding a word to your permanent vocabulary, you will have an approximate idea of the meaning. Perhaps  you will recognize know that the word staccato is a musical word,  but unsure what specifically it refers to.   If you cannot immediately come up with a definition, it’s worthwhile to doublecheck your understanding. When a word is in the offing,  you may confuse the meaning of the word with its antonym (as is the case with stalactite and stalagmite).
• Some people have a natural ability to absorb new words like a sponge (I don’t!) But often these  human sponges simply know how to use the word as it was originally used without really knowing how to use the word in new and appropriate ways.  (This phenomenon   is reminiscent  of  the Chinese room thought experiment).
• Similarly, some people are very good at guessing the meaning of a word or phrase in a given context. This is a valuable deductive skill, but it often  masks  the fact that the person still doesn’t know what the word itself means.  Playing these guessing games is a good exercise, but it still is  necessary to  verify the accuracy of your guess.   Often, if you do too much guessing and not enough verifying, you may have no specific understanding of the word itself, only a familiarity with the word in a single context.  In these cases,   it could even be more difficult to learn the word’s meaning because you haven’t made any mental effort  to store it in  memory.
• Keeping a word list or flash cards lets you  revisit  words. Without  revisiting, you don’t have a chance to test your understanding.   Most words occur rarely, and unless you have an incredible memory, it will be hard to retain this word when you encounter it  a second time. Yesterday while reading, I encountered three words blowsy, suss and biddy. I am ashamed to admit that I looked up these words for the first time 15 years ago in my Johnson O’Connor days, and I still have an incomplete understanding of what these words mean.  (I hope that mentioning them here will help me to remember them).
• About 40% of the words I look up in the dictionary are words I’ve already  looked up.  In a way, I am just  “grading myself” to see if I really know the word.
• Some rare words are easy to remember; other rare words are hard. Take the word callipygian. Chances are that you’ve never heard of it, but once you do, remembering it is almost never a problem.  On the other hand, some words can not sound particularly exotic (such as facultative or prolepsis) but seem practically impossible to learn (for me at least). Don’t judge a word’s difficulty merely on the basis of how exotic it sounds.
• Watch the verbal phrases and secondary meanings of common words. One valuable thing I learned from my brilliant Albanian students was how hard  some verbal phrases (i.e., verb + preposition) can be  for nonnative speakers. Hey, they can be hard for native English speakers too. Why? Because we assume we already know them. We may know what the word “set” and “to” mean, but do we know the meaning of  set-to?  Forcing is another word I learned which has a specific meaning in climate change science and also mathematics. I don’t pretend to understand all the subtleties of this word, but I shouldn’t assume that knowing the word “force” would help me with learning the word forcing.  Learning those secondary meanings can be just as useful as learning a word like callipygian. 
• You’d be surprised at how many words  a low-vocabulary person will know which a high-vocabulary type like myself will never have heard of.  When working at Johnson O’Connor, I remember  talking to a low-vocabulary student about something, and he mentioned the word “strafing.”  Say what? The student was in the military and liked to read World War 2 books;  this word was a common everyday word to him and he was actually shocked that I had never heard of it. Often I’ll be talking to a high school student and hear a totally  new word (from music or cinema or computers or videogaming). You don’t learn new words by listening to CEOs or writers or professors. You learn them by talking to car mechanics and florists and nurses.
• The number of learned words grow over time.  A high school person with an excellent vocabulary is generally   no match for a 35 year old with an average vocabulary.
• I realize that books are  becoming passe, but if you look at the inside cover of my older books,  you will generally see words handwritten on the inside cover (with a page number). I usually never bothered to look up a word while reading – I didn’t want to interrupt my enjoyment – but I almost always looked up the word in a dictionary later. Sometimes I would write the meaning on the inside cover; sometimes I would transfer the word onto a word list; sometimes I would transfer the words to a flash cards (by the way, I used to write the words down on the back of old business cards and go over them in my spare time). Remember: books are meant to be written on. Feel free to circle words or write things on the front cover. Dictionaries especially. (The unabridged American Heritage Dictionary is the best I know of; make sure to buy the unabridged edition). After you look up a word in the dictionary, always circle it. That way, if you have to look it up again, you can do find it more easily. If you  buy a dictionary, I would prefer  an unabridged dictionary even if that means you can’t carry it around easily. Aside from helping students under 16,  portable  dictionaries can be more frustrating than rewarding.  Update. Although I still love the American Heritage Dictionary, I found an excellent deal on a dictionary of comparable or better quality, the New Oxford American Dictionary (see this review and compare the sample pages on Amazon). AHD looks nicer, but NOAD has a better etymology and more secondary meanings and longer definitions.
• At the moment, I haven’t found ebook dictionaries to be useful.
• Their usefulness is not obvious, but I find Visual Dictionaries to be both useful and delightful.  They let you see how something is integrated with other parts; they also let you see how one thing compares with other things (like flowers or birds or clothes or architecture). Really, when I come across a reference to a bird or flower, I just think of it generically. How much better it would be to have a specific picture in your mind. Most of the time, you can find this information online, but only if you know what you’re looking for! By the way, what’s the name of that flower with  bright red petals and a bright yellow mound in the middle? I recommend  the older  MacMillian Visual Dictionary  but the more recent Merriam-Webster’s Visual Dictionary might also be good too. (I would browse through them at a good bookstore).
• I’m of two minds about online dictionaries. Using them allows you to surf to additional material about a word. (For example, you can go to the wikipedia article about belaying and even a youtube video. For words with a specific visual meaning, you can usually see a good illustration which would be impractical to have in a print dictionary. On the other hand, web dictionaries tend to be commercial or tend to divide words into separate web pages (regardless of whether they deserve a separate web page or not). It is nice to have something you can use without needing the computer to be  on. 
• Although I’ve never actually used them, you can install plugins for your browser which allow you to right click a word and see its meaning in a popup window. (Dictionary tooltip   looks particularly impressive).
• Native English speakers learns words differently from nonnative speakers. Immigrants tend to look for words which are parallel to words in their own language, and they tend to prefer words which are common across languages.  That is why in a conversation with nonnative speakers, the type of words being used may sound  more sophisticated even though the conversation is easier to follow.  Nonnative speakers usually don’t have a good sense of which kinds of words or phrases are the most useful or common. As a result, they (unintentionally) learn lots of uncommon words and never get around to learning basic words. This is unavoidable. When learning English as a foreign language, it helps to use reading passages where the words have already been looked up and the most useful words have been identified.
• You need to keep a  permanent record of  words you  encounter.  (As of today, I have started to keep my ongoing vocabulary  list on a separate page). I know it sounds like lot of trouble, but it makes it easier to identify problem words. Writing them down forces me to move them into my active treasury of words. If you don’t have time to write them down and look them up, simply jot them down in a Google Docs document until you find the time to do so.  
• Don’t worry about using words incorrectly. It happens. I frequently discover that I have learned a word partially or even wrongly. Sure, don’t rush to use a $2 word after you discover it, but really, the public shame of misusing a word in conversation is vastly overstated.  (I am much more cautious when I write though). When writing, if the word doesn’t fit snugly into the context you need it for, chances are that either you  don’t need this word or don’t know it well enough to use it. (Yes, a simpler word is almost always better if  it conveys  what you want).
• For learning words, reading is not that important.  Sure, everyone should read more; that increases exposure to words and makes it easier for words  to stick.  But reading itself  does not guarantee a high vocabulary. It’s more important to be curious about words around you and to verify that you actually know their meanings.   Double-checking and even triple-checking is necessary. Overconfidence is always a risk; it’s easy to convince yourself that your understanding of words is greater than it actually is.  It takes a wise man to recognize his own  ignorance.

See also: Robert Nagle’s Ongoing Word List and  English Vocabulary Resources for  (English-speaking) kids.

Here is a list of words I am trying to learn the meaning of. For more, see my essay about how to improve your vocabulary.

By the way, I won’t accept any comments here unless the comment is specifically about one of the words mentioned here.

• 20091117 biddy . 1)hen or fowl, 2)garrulous woman, gossipy or interfering woman
• 20091117 blowsy (also blowzy).  untidy in appearance (usually to describe a woman);  slovely or sluttish; ruddy in complexion, red-faced
• 20091203 bonhomie. affability, disposition to be friendly and approachable (easy to talk to)
• 20091203 cadge v. ask for and get free, be a parasite
• 20091203 Chautauqua. adult education movement from the 19th/20th century; it brought entertainment and culture in a “summer camp” or lyceum format; named after a city in NY where they were held
• 20091126 charger. Large decorative plate used to dress up dinner parties at parties, weddings and other special events.
• 20011201 chyron. television graphic that occupies the lower area of the screen (like what you see on Fox News or CNN).
• 20091126 gilded. (gild – to cover with a thin layer of gold); golden; covered with a layer of gold; having a falsely pleasant appearance.
• 20091126 leprous. htdw leprosy; appearing decayed
• 20091126 lissome. moving and bending with ease; lithe; quick and graceful in movement
• 20091121saccade – (n). (rare) a sudden jerking movement; a rapid jerky movement of the eye (voluntary or involuntary) from one focus to another
• 20091121 saccadic – characterized by discontinuous or sporadic movement; jerky. (see saccade)
• 20091118 supererogation. Effort above and beyond the call of duty; more than what is needed or required (adj)
• 20091203 supernumerary a person serving no apparent function; a minor actor in crowd scenes. Non-regular member of a staff.
• 20091117 set-to: brief (usually heated) conflict or argument.
• 20091117 suss out: to examine so as to check out the accuracy, quality or condition; size up or study.
• 20091126 trivet: an object placed between a hot serving dish and a table. Trivet also refers to tripods used to elevate pots from the coals of an open fire.

Mike Wise writes a fascinating account of what happened to the 2 basketball players in Hoop Dreams. Details:

• Coach Pingatore and the school were parties to a suit to prevent the film from being released theatrically.
• the film wasn’t even nominated for a Oscar because Academy Members wanted the film stopped after 20 minutes
• one of the basketball players William Gates married his childhood sweetheart (who had a baby during the shooting of the documentary)
• William Gates is a minister; Arthur Agee runs a motivational foundation with sportswear
• Both people had the opportunity to suit up and play with NBA members
• 10 of Agee’s friends in the film are now dead
• The two players have 8 children between them
• the families received $175,000-200,000 for participating in the film (each?)
• Arthur gave up on his dream to go into the NBA by choosing to participate in one of the film director’s other projects
• Gates’ older brother was murdered

Here’s a Roger Ebert retrospective about the film. Btw,  there was a sequel to Hoop Dream (condemned by all) and the Criterion edition of Hoop Dreams has commmentaries by the two basketball players themselves. 

Some fascinating commentary on the Roger Ebert post:

Read the rest of this entry »

As much as I care about climate change, I am weary of the argumentation. Just today a friend sent me a wretched piece about global warming if only to make me mad.

Realclimate.org is less argumentative (although the comments sometimes devolve), and if you read just the posts (not the comments), you gain a better understanding of the science. It feels good. I’m getting to the point where I just want to hear what real scientists have to say. I really don’t consider myself a scientist (although I sometimes wish that I had taken a few more science classes at school and with more enthusiasm).  But the endless arguing over the same rhetorical points seems unproductive.

Here’s a piece complaining about the shallowness of the Superfreakonomics book. One of seven million. (I expect that years from now, these points will be brought up). 

Finally, here is a forum at the Physics Forums that discusses climate change questions, with a policy that only peer-reviewed journals can be cited. As a result, the discussions tend to be a lot more fruitful.

P.S. If you go to the Youtube site to watch the video, watch it in HD; you won’t regret it!

See also: the babe theory of political movements . I never thought this theory was to be taken seriously, but it explains a lot. (Of course, female beauty is easily manipulated by commercial interests. I’m sure Exxon Mobile could hire supermodels that are 10x more gorgeous than the ones in this ad to reassure us about the sexy power of fossil fuels).

Joe Brewer has a brilliant commentary:

Each layer of clothing fits within the supermodel frame, meaning that the style of garments represent the glamor and extravagance of the fashion industry.  As the models remove each article of clothing, they are promoting the idea that all these layers are not only unnecessary, but they are bad for us.

This puts the fashion industry in a precarious position.  If all those layers of extravagance (metaphorically implied as causing the heating problem) are harmful AND unnecessary, we can and should return to simpler forms of pleasure (like sexual interaction with those who appeal to us and, by extension, other kinds of simple pleasures) that do not contribute to the disruption of global climate.

This  ad is effective because males as a demographic are more opposed to climate change bills than females. On the other hand,  if it tries to be too sexy it triggers a defensive reaction; whoa, aren’t we being manipulated?

I’m trying to imagine what a counterad would be like. I’ve seen one parody with the message, “are you going to agree with some goal merely because I’ve hinted at disrobing once a certain number has been reached?” The good thing is that the industry can’t really make a smart counterad– the coal ads tend to be bland and idyllic and focused on a vague feeling instead of a decisive goal (See a satirical video example here).

Metaphorically it works too (although it certainly treads over a line–that’s a REALLY long ad!) So you feel more heat if you retreat to a lower number which means less heat-trapping gases? It’s a contradiction.  It is taking the “less is more” meme and glamorizing it. While it probably won’t persuade  a denialist,  at least it introduces the idea that it is possible to reduce the world’s ppm level (which is still a far-fetched idea even to many in the climate change reform community). Also, I think the goal of the ad is even more limited: to raise awareness of the PPM number and the need to keep it from increasing.

The problem, based on my limited scientific understanding, is that reducing ppm’s would require a massive sea change; it’s not something like going on a diet and weighing yourself and seeing the gradual improvements.  A 350 ppm target would require lots of planning and reengineering  (and I say this as a climate change activist).  Most climate change scientists would be satisfied just to prevent future increases in the carbon level. The problem with the ad is that it makes a very-hard-task seem relatively easy.  Is it helpful for  the climate change movement if reducing the PPMs is portrayed as “easy?”

I think one commenter’s mention of the earth/woman metaphor is right on. Men are the ones with  tools and industry and rationality; women are the ones who are supposed to be  pretty and in touch with their emotional side.  In this ad, the woman are the ones taking action; they are also striving (not the men).  Men are serious; they have to work hard; they have to get their hands dirty. Women are focused on aesthetics and keeping things clean. The question becomes, which version of reality do you prefer: the aesthetic or the rational one?

I expect this ad to be parodied a lot; will that make people forget the point of the original ad?

Just to be clear: I endorse the goals of the 350 movement, if only to provide a margin of safety against pernicious consequences.And I generally approve of radical messages to make a point.   (read this update). I just have to wonder if the sexy method is going to bring the wrong kind of attention.

Nov 6 Update. I probably should have include some science link about whether the 350 ppm goal is desirable.