New plans!

Ooh, now I know what I'm doing this weekend. 450kr for a pennywhistle workshop - with Mary Bergin?? Hot damn! I wonder if there are any spots left...
yami · 15:56 · 31 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary

It’s doing weather outside

It's doing weather outside, and doing is for once the right verb to use. I'm sitting on a third floor computer lab (and that's four stories up, for all you Americans and Icelanders and members of other nations who don't start counting at "stuen") and there are leaves swirling around in the air past my window. Plus I thought I heard thunder, or maybe it was just construction noises - but either way it's got me in the mood for a good storm. Sitting in the library with thunder and loud heavy rain and making a dent in my list of articles on the origins and mechanisms and history of intraplate seismicity in and around New Madrid, Missouri... you can't get any more hyggelig while still being productive.
yami · 10:23 · 31 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary

Language is for Losers

Last but not least: after agitating about your native language, try this: a collection of quotes of the form "language X is essentially language Y under condition Z". My favorite: American English is essentially a tool to keep a person from ever being able to speak another language.
yami · 20:28 · 30 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Links, Language

too much ask google

That particular gimmick is just a little too much fun for an occasional intrusion into my blog; I've decided to give it a blog of its own. If anyone wants to play too, just email me, and I'll invite you on. It'll be a good wholesome waste of time that we could be using to better ourselves and the world around us.

I should give myself more work to do. This is getting ridiculous.
yami · 19:46 · 30 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Announcements

ask google

I think I will inagurate a new occasional column in this blog by asking this question: what color is seismology?
  • 7,440 - +seismology +clear
  • 7,210 - +seismology +white
  • 7,150 - +seismology +red
  • 6,440 - +seismology +black
  • 5,980 - +seismology +green
  • 3,940 - +seismology +blue
  • 2,060 - +seismology +yellow
  • 1,270 - +seismology +orange
  • 385 - +seismology +purple
  • 306 - +seismology +violet
  • 112 - +seismology +indigo
  • 110 - +seismology +lemon
  • 28 - +seismology +avocado
  • 11 - +seismology +puce
  • 10 - +seismology +mauve
  • 1 - +seismology +taupe | +seismology +fuschia
There you have it, seismology is clear. I really ought to stop playing word dissociation. I bought some sheet music today, a collection of Chopin which was the only book in the shop to include my darling fantasie-impromptu. Perhaps I'll go bang on the piano for a while.
yami · 14:32 · 30 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Whimsy

HT for kunst

Even though most of you will never see what I'm talking about, for the record, I would like to state the following: the picture on my bus pass is not simply a funny-looking picture of me. It is art. Through the use of bland fluorescent lighting and cheapass processing, it depicts the dehumanizing effects of our postmodern industrialized worker bee culture. It is probably a poststructuralist reading of apophatic discursive strategies as well.
yami · 15:35 · 29 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Ineffable

speakin’ the heathen chinee - part II

Whenever I'm travelling abroad, I worry about the fact that I either don't speak the native language, or don't speak it well enough to please the Evil Culture Masters (one of these days, thugs from the académie française are going to come in the dead of night and beat me to death with a dictionary, I swear). Away from home I become like-it-or-not a representative of all the pop culture that by virtue of an economic bludgeon has spread round the globe and turned into, well, all those English-language ads on Danish television. And this brings on nebulous feelings of guilt.

To be painfully honest with myself, I think this guilt lies at the heart of yesterday's post - aside from the general whining about how I can't swear in public. But, the more time I actually spend abroad, the more I wonder if I'm just being silly. Of course it's ridiculous that the American public education system doesn't try harder to shove a second language down our throats, but if I'm going to start feeling guilty for all the failures of the American public education system then I've got an awful lot of angst ahead of me. And after all, the important thing isn't how you communicate, it's that you communicate at all, and between English and crap French I can get on well enough in most urban/educated parts of the world. The rural/less-educated, I suppose, will just have to do without my glorious presence until I can find an interpreter. I don't know how they'll ever manage.

Eh. There's more to whinge, but none of it's important, and I should really go do my Danish homework. Undskyld, kan du sige mig, hvor mange gange jeg skal klippe på et blåt kort, når jeg skal til Hvidovre?
yami · 11:16 · 29 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Foreign

speakin’ the heathen chinee

Speculations on the future of the English language: a bandwagon I can't help but fall on to.



I consider Denmark in many ways to be a bilingual country - sure, very few people speak English as their first language, but practically everyone speaks it as their second, and they do so with an immense amount of skill and pragmatic acceptance. To varying degrees the same is true throughout Western Europe, and it's not difficult to find a community of people, few-to-none of whom speak English natively, who use English as a lingua franca on a regular basis. Since I tend to hang out in groups like this, I've noticed my speech patterns changing - I've absorbed some quaint British vocabulary, have made more use of that persnickity compound past tense, and my adverbs are sliding uncontrolledly around my sentences, conforming at one moment to American idiom, the next to directly translated German or some such. It's all left me with the sense that the entire developed world, regardless of the way they speak to their families, has some sort of vital stake in helping to shape the future of English.



So I'm convinced that with increasing globalization, there will emerge some kind of standard non-native English dialect, with most of the difficulties ironed out and a few redundancies and random nifty words put in. If my Danish teachers are representative, the word "sibling" will have vanished, replaced probably by the odd German word "handy" which means "cell phone" and has no discernable roots in either German or English. The continuous tenses will go away, and so of course will conjugating (the Danes are especially bad about this, probably because Danish doesn't conjugate). The details of this process, I'm not certain about, but I want it to happen so therefore I believe it's happening now. Nice how that works, eh?



I think in a lot of ways I feel the same way about my native language as I do about my native country: bring on the immigrants! More ethnic food and funny words for me! Meanwhile, back Stateside, I'm rooting for the eventual proliferation of Spanglish, just so my descendants can have swear words that aren't offensive around the world. If I'm not going to be able to speak the native language, I want to at least be able to swear with impunity, dammit!
yami · 18:04 · 28 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Foreign

new blog

My prodding has finally paid off: grid got himself a blog. That makes two (count 'em, two) people I met first in realityland who have moved in to blogland with me. Hooray! It's such a convenient way to keep abreast of far-flung gossip.

And I'm such a lazy git.

Also: fun Bible quizzes! I did quite badly on most of them, including the timely whose god is more vicious?. But, from someone whose childhood cosmology placed the baby Jesus on a level with Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, what else can you expect?

If you're in Denmark, have fun setting your clocks back. I know I will; I can never remember how to reset the time on any of my cute digital watches, and always discover new features each time I try. Who knew that for 99 cents I'd also be getting a bizarre stopwatch that doesn't seem to work at all?

Oi. God nat.
yami · 1:09 · 28 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Links

Lots of Money

I leave, and some disgruntled old IBM Intel-founding alumnus (ever heard of Moore's law? yeah, that one) gives the school $600 million. Christ. What I love best, as usual, is David Baltimore's spin on the deal: "[the money] will allow us to... maintain our greatness in the many areas in which we are preeminent...". Conspiracy theories, anyone?

My prediction: after it's all spent, we still won't have decent acoustics in any of our auditoriums. Let's hear it for the Caltech Wind Ensemble!
yami · 17:27 · 27 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Crap