Deeply Carved Writings

Demonstrative Pronoun Fail

2008-07-26T21:35:00.003+10:00

Here's an error message I got the other day when I mistyped a password:

Am I authorised to click 'OK'?

The Unitent

2008-07-20T15:46:00.003+10:00

When a Unitard clearly isn't going to be be big enough ... ladies and gentlemen, step right up!

Tent erected in honour of the poo germ spray page at PAN.

The apple not falling very far from the tree

2008-07-06T22:42:00.003+10:00

You know how sometimes you're struck by a similarity between your own behaviour and your parents'? Like for instance, if I'm making a round of drinks for a few people, I know I'll forget which is which if they're in random order, so some years back I got into the habit of just arranging them alphabetically. OCD you may say, but it keeps me out of trouble. Moreover, in the modern world, you're more likely to know someone's given name than surname, so I alphabetise by given name. A year or two ago, I found out my mother does the very same thing. Surely that can't be very common?

Anyhow, more recently I was tickled to see this. This came at about the end of my song parody heyday, and a month or two after we were talking about Truss' book on PAN. I hadn't discussed either of those things with my mother, so it's a total coincidence ... or genetics!

40000 is a big number

2008-03-31T16:17:00.004+11:00

There are forty thousand dots in this picture. One for each post at TMHQ so far.

Crafty me & a computer-generated passive aggressive note

2008-03-10T11:12:00.008+11:00

Firstly, I've had some data integrity trouble with the photos of the one thing I ever knitted, a coat for my first kid. So the bottoms of these photos are missing. Sorry. But here's my daughter pretending to be a ghost, and then peek-a-booing. This coat took a very long time to knit, because I had never knit anything before. It was arguably an unsuitable project for a beginner. Still, I enjoyed doing it & I love these photos.

Also, while I'm at it, I'll post the best painting I've ever done. I'm not much of an artist; I'm the artistic dunce of the family. But a couple fo days ago I got roped into joining in when my concubine & our daughters were painting, with this result:

Lastly, a passive-aggressive reply I got from the computer algebra package Mathematica a couple of days ago. I'm not sending this to Kerry, because I doubt it will be everyone's kind of thing, but maybe someone here will see the funny side. I had a system of equations I wanted to solve. These equations involved complex variables and their conjugates (that is, variables from the complex plane and their mirror images reflected through the real axis). I entered my equations into Mathematica which, like Maple (which I had tried first), was unable to solve them. But whereas Maple had just said "sorry, I can't solve your equations" or something like that, Mathematica tried to blame me:What I'd like is to know what all the solutions are, but I'll have to live on in ignorance. I did manage to find a couple of solutions by hand---though evidently, whatever I was doing, it wasn't really "algebra".

2008-02-21T15:40:00.002+11:00

This is an animation I've produced this week to help illustrate a couple of concepts from Operations Research (a branch of ... let's say mathematics). I don't know as I write this whether the image will be shown as an animation. If not, you can probably just download it and open it in Quicktime or whatever. That might be preferable, anyway, since you're supposed to be able to slide the line back & forth with the slider & see what happens. I should compress the image for the web, I know, but I don't know how, sorry.

Loosely, the red lines show the contours of some objective you're trying to achieve, e.g., profit. So the various points on the graph represent various business strategies, and the further northeast you get, the more money you're making. But you can't go into the yellow regions, because of various constraints; each of those lines represents a constraint, probably due to your having a fixed quantity of some resource.

The animation changes one of the constraints, to show how the amount available of that resource affects the profit you can achieve.

Maybe I'd better leave it at that for now!

With the right attitude, you can't fail

2008-02-17T17:17:00.002+11:00

This story's about 8 or 9 weeks old now. I went with my family to Aotearoa for 6 weeks over xmasny, and this is the story of our taxi ride to the airport, at the start of our holiday.

The taxi driver was a cheerful, friendly fellow with a heavy Eastern European accent. Right at the outset, he asked us if we'd mind stopping at a petrol (= gas) station on the way. We had left in plenty of time, and the fare was fixed in advance, so of course we said fine.

He asked a few questions and told us a bit about his life, & at first it was pleasant. However, it's a long way to the airport from our place, & as the conversation wore on, the driver latched onto my 15yo stepson in a fairly misguided and very irritating way. He began to exhort him to work hard at school. That doesn't sound so bad, of course, but it was the way he went about it: "My sons, when they went to university, they never have girlfriends. You know why? They too busy, study, study, study. Now, one is an accountant, the other is a manager. Now, they have fifty girlfriends. They have nice car, nice clothes, they go into a nightclub, any girl there will want to talk to them. I talk to you now like a father, I give you good advice, you listen, you study hard, when you're twenty-five, you'll have very nice car, you can really enjoy life." And on and on and on.

Now, I know, attitudes to material success vary greatly. To my stepson, I'm sure, that sounded like a nightmarish future. But he's a very polite young man, and managed---only just---to feign interest. Eventually we got to the petrol station, & it was quite a relief, because the driver went inside, and concubine and I were able to commiserate with stepson and give him the strength needed to withstand the remainder of the onslaught.

Anyhow, until we got to the petrol station, we were assuming, as probably are you, dear reader, that our object there was to buy petrol. Evidently not. The driver went inside for three or four minutes, came out, resumed driving, got on his cellphone & had a quick conversation with someone about the errand. The only thing I really made out was the line, "He wouldn't sign it. No. I don't know. He wouldn't sign it."

The driver then advised us that there was some accident or roadworks or something on the usual route, & that it would probably be a lot quicker to go another way. I don't know Sydney's roads very well, & we weren't in a hurry anyway, so we said fine, whatever. So we took the alternative route, and it turned out to be very slow, with very heavy traffic. Our punctual arrival at the airport was never in jeopardy, which is just as well; otherwise, I might not have been so amused by the logical dubiosity of the driver's repeatedly indicating all the traffic and saying, self-congratulatorily, "See? I'm not the only smart!!"

The Church of Arneticetheism

2007-11-29T22:49:00.000+11:00

I'm starting a new church, & want advice/disciples. It's based on ~~something that occurred to me~~ a ~~vision~~ revelation I had today in the ~~toilet~~ desert.

I was thinking about the history of religion: about how, initially, people personified everything, & then they systematised their beliefs somewhat so that there were various gods responsible for various aspects of nature. Over the centuries, these gods were consolidated, so that there were fewer and fewer. Nowadays many people don't believe in any gods at all. So we see a progression: animism, polytheism, monotheism, atheism, with the number of spirits or gods steadily decreasing from very many, to several, to one, to zero.

So anyhow, I was thinking about these things (with a blank mind and a pure heart, naturally), when, lo & hark (the beer of angels, incidentally), it was revealed unto me that the true number of gods is −1.

This is a pivotal revelation, as you will recognise immediately, deep in your souls, and a wondrous sign that the end thymes are nigh. On the other hand, it could do with some further clarification. Any ideas? a

You must wear The Unitard

2007-11-19T12:28:00.000+11:00

If you aren't a regular at PAN, don't bother with this one. If you are, please see the Unitard thread.

My tunes on last.fm

2007-11-18T02:35:00.000+11:00

My concubine complained about the font so maybe I'll give Georgia a try. (Georgia the font, that is.)

I've put two tunes on Last.fm. No PAN tunes yet; I'm not quite game to record a whole tune de novo at the moment, but I'm trying to stoke up the enthusiasm. (A lot of enthusiasm is necessary---I've never managed to record a tune without giving up a whole night's sleep.) I so should listen to Andy & migrate to Wordpress before it's too late, because I've now learned that, at Last.fm, I can put my tunes up, but can't add even short descriptions.

So, the tunes are not here, they are here. But the descriptions are here:

The Two Good Girls and the Two Bad Girls: this is a monologue my younger daughter extemporised once in the back of the car we used to have, shortly before she turned 3, which I put to music.

The Call of the Mountain Thing: this is a B-grade horror ballad I wrote to try to impress my concubine before we hooked up. (It's one of many things I tried, so this may not have been the deciding factor.) Anyhow, its genesis was the bassline in the chorus, which is vaguely reminiscent of the theme from Grieg's Hall of the Mountain King; geddit?

I know the recording quality is shoddy; sorry, I don't care. I care a bit more about my lack of skill with the instruments, but still not very much. The writing's the side of it that really interests me. Any comments about that, & also about how easy or hard it is to find & listen to the tunes, would be welcome.

Metaphors We Live By

2007-11-15T16:31:00.000+11:00

I still haven't got the time or mental space to post any of my own thoughts or experiences, so I'm going to rip off other people's. I'm going to post something interesting I read yesterday; better than nothing, right? I'm reading Metaphors We Live By, a 1980 book by Lakoff & Johnson positing that metaphor is a much deeper principle than the literary device it is sometimes assumed to be; rather, they reckon, it helps structure our conceptualisation of the world, & is crucial to our comprehension of all abstract concepts. It's kind of slow in places but every 5 pages or so there's a "hey wow" moment. Anyhow, yesterday I got to this bit on pp 143--144 which I like enough to type out in full:

Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. The expression was "the solution of my problems"---which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all. All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form. The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out. And since you do not have complete control over what goes into the solution, you are constantly finding old and new problems precipitating out and present problems dissolving, partly because of your efforts and partly despite anything you do.

The CHEMICAL metaphor gives us a new view of human problems. It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were "solved" turn up again and again. The CHEMICAL metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever. To treat them as things that can be "solved" once and for all is pointless. To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would be to accept it as a fact the no problem ever disappears forever. Rather than direct your energies toward solving your problems once and for all, you would direct your energies toward finding out what catalysts will dissolve your most pressing problems for the longest time without precipitating worse ones. The reappearance of a problem is viewed as a natural occurance rather than a failure on your part to find "the right way to solve it."

To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would mean that your problems have a different kind of reality for you. A temporary solution would be an accomplishment rather than a failure. Problems would be part of the natural order of things rather than disorders to be "cured." The way you would understand your everyday life and the way you would act in it would be different if you lived by the CHEMICAL metaphor.

(By the way, Mishee, if you're reading this, I don't think that's what they mean by "living by the CHEMICAL metaphor.")

Why today of all days?

2007-11-12T13:06:00.000+11:00

Alright, now, nobody get your hopes up! Let me say from the outset that I don't have any specific immediate plans for this blog. My main reason for setting it up is just to verify the procedure, so I can

a) try to talk my mother into blogging somewhere where anonymous or casual replies are allowed, and

b) fantasise about maybe one day putting some PAN tunes online.

[Update, 15 Nov: ironically, I have now learned that I can't post audio files here! So I guess every blog host has its strengths & weaknesses. Andy suggests Wordpress; maybe they've got everything, I don't know.]

However, I have a heap of marking to do, & an exam to set for Wednesday which is currently in a very early state of preparation. Also, the computer on which I hope to record my PAN tunes is, at this point, still only a prophecy. I will elaborate on everything when able; in the meantime, hopefully no one is reading.