bearing blog

Gratuitous geek post.

No reason, just a post (coincidentally, from a year ago today) that I came across while surfing aimlessly, on Wolfram's blog, about the powerful convenience of being able to embed images directly into lines of Mathematica code.  Nifty pics at the link, of interest to photo-manipulators, image processors, and the like.

I kind of miss playing with Mathematica.  Wonder if they'll ever come out with a homeschooler's math course based on it, because that would be awesome.  And we thought the TI-81 was cool back in 1990.

UPDATE:  It looks like there used to be a Mathematica Homeschool Kit, but all the info I can find is from 2003.

Grammar.

Eugene Volokh is blogging about grammar again and getting lots of comments.  It's the old "what is standard?" argument again...

So, commenters, is it that all these writers (whose work ranges from the late 1500s to the 1900s) and many more were wrong, and you’re right, when you say that “their” can’t be used in these contexts? Is it that you have the Logic of the Language on your side — the same logic that tolerates the singular “you are,” “aren’t I?,” “ice cream,” and much more, but that as a matter of the laws of logic balks at a singular “they”? Or is it just that you’re discussing what you find aesthetically pleasing (or even pedagogically optimal, for instance with an eye towards teaching students usage that will satisfy self-described “purists” and will thus serve them well socially)? If it’s the latter, I’ll happily end the debate. But my sense is that many people who denounce the singular “they” (including where the singular relates to nouns with a collective meaning, such as “everyone”) and similar matters are making an assertion about correctness, and not just about their own tastes or about the most useful teaching approaches.

As a writer -- of blog posts, personal correspondence, scientific papers, and the like -- my style priorities come in this order.

1. Clarity
2. Elegance (a context-dependent subjective judgment)
3. Logical construction
4. Adherence to standard grammatical rules

Most of the time, these four goals align.  Occasionally they don't.  And when they do, a writer has to make a choice.  Everybody must take his or her own bag adheres to rules, and is logical.  It is, I think, just as clear as Everybody must take their own bag.  In most contexts it's not as elegant.

As a teacher, though, I'm a big believer in instructing kids and other emergent writers "slavish adherence to standard grammatical rules," followed by "logical construction of sentences."  

First, I want them to learn the rules; occasionally context demands slavish adherence to standard rules, and in most contexts nonstandard writing creates unintended distraction rather than intended style and elegance.

Second, it's easier to teach younger children objective, clear rules.  It's much harder to explain concepts like "elegance" and "clarity," at least until they're older.

Third, subjective evaluation of writing is made easier over time as learners gain confidence and comfort with the language they're writing in, and as they gain exposure to many contexts and to examples of really excellent writing that may play looser with standard syntax.

Fourth, you get more leeway with nonstandard writing when you're good at it, and especially, good at judging when it works and when it doesn't.  

That's pedagogy for you -- and not everyone with an opinion on the subject has bothered to distinguish pedagogical from stylistic issues.

History and poetry.

In honor of yesterday's Feast of the Holy Rosary (née Our Lady of Victory), Donald McClarey of The American Catholic reposts part of Chesterton's classic poem Lepanto and links to a book review (by Victor Davis Hansen) of a one-volume history of that October 7, 1571 battle.  

Why not celebrate a feast day by reading history, and dabbling in poetry?  Sounds appropriate to me.

As I noted in the comments on McClarey's post, I first encountered Lepanto in the form of these four lines:

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath


(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)


And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,


Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain...

which were printed as part of the foreword of a paperback edition of Don Quixote that I read at age 14.  I didn't remember who wrote them, and I didn't know who Don John was, but they stuck in my memory and years later I was delighted to discover that Chesterton was the author, and with that discovery the rest of the poem.  I am a sucker for anything written in such a steady meter, I suppose.

The perils of being a grammar geek, or pedant, or whatever.

A funny story (I thought so anyway) from Neal at Literal-Minded.  

 As far as I was concerned, Chad’s use of "myself" was not only a mistake, but a mistake that needed to be corrected, by me, then and there.

“With me,” I interrupted.

“What?” Chad asked.

“Michelle will be riding with me.”

“No-o-o,” Chad said, looking puzzled as he reviewed the drivers and riders in his head. “Michelle will be riding with me.”

“He’s correcting your grammar,” Michelle told him. “You said ‘with myself.’” But even the clarification from Michelle—who had dated Chad the previous year, by the way—couldn’t completely erase the pathetic impression of a jealous loser, stepping up to challenge Chad for the privilege of driving Michelle to the dance. I still cringe when I think about it. Luckily, I have much more embarrassing memories to draw on to make this one not so bad.

Preceded, of course, by a thorough linguistic explanation of reflexive pronouns.

Closing proliferation.

My friend Adrienne sent me this link to an amusing blog post about Christian letter/email closings:

When I was in high school my parents went to a really awesome weekend retreat, and they came home with all sorts of encouraging notes from people who had also been to the retreat, and many of those notes were closed with the following words:

In Him, 

Encouraging Christian’s Name

And I’ll go ahead and admit it: I was a wee big fascinated with the “In Him” sign-off. After practicing with it awhile in notes both real and imagined, I decided that I really liked working the Christian closing into my 16 year-old correspondence. For instance:

I don’t know what in the world he thinks that he’s thinking, but he’s DEFINITELY not thinking the same thing that I’m thinking. By the way, aren’t my new Reebok high tops the cutest thing you’ve ever seen? I think they are SO MAJOR.

In Him,

Soph

...

Right after David and I got married I started teaching at a Christian school, and I noticed almost immediately that “In Him” was no longer in vogue. Oh, I mean, it was FINE, and it would certainly do in a pinch, but the closings were a bit more elaborate. All I could figure was that during the first half of my 20s, when I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to Things Christian, the body of Christ got together and decided to up the holy ante in their email and letter closings...

This is not something that Catholic bloggers are immune from...

For word nerds.

Fun new alternative to an online dictionary:  Wordnik.  Try it next time you want to look something up.  Or play the game (similar in concept to Googlewhacking):  see if you can come up with a word that nobody has yet tried to look up on Wordnik before.  

I suppose this could make Boggle more interesting.

(h/t Literal-Minded)

Redefinition of terms.

It's common to dismiss numbers that prove somebody else's point as "lies, damned lies and statistics."  

That kind of flip refusal to engage with data is a sure sign of someone who doesn't want to think too hard.  Or someone who is deeply suspicious of anything that looks like math.

  Numbers are numbers.  If they're properly gathered and accurately reported -- that's key of course -- they just don't spin, obscure, imply, connote, the way that the English language can.  Obviously people are tempted to emphasize numbers they like and downplay numbers they don't like, say, in press releases and things like that; but if you take the time to go back and look at the source data, and get to decide for yourself which numbers are important, you can get at something approaching truth.  

So I reject the glib "statistics = lies" equation. 

But then something comes along that makes me want to title a post "Lies, damned lies and statistics."  James Taranto reports:

Amid all the gloomy economic news, the New York Times brings us an encouraging report on social trends:

"The number of black children being raised by two parents appears to be edging higher than at any time in a generation, at nearly 40 percent, according to newly released census data. . . .

"According to the bureau's estimates, the number of black children living with two parents was 59 percent in 1970, falling to 42 percent in 1980, 38 percent in 1990 and 35 percent in 2004. In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, it was 40 percent."

What accounts for the turnaround? The Times explains:

"Demographers said such a trend might be partly attributable to the growing proportion of immigrants in the nation's black population. It may have been driven, too, by the values of an emerging black middle class, a trend that could be jeopardized by the current economic meltdown.

The Census Bureau attributed an indeterminate amount of the increase to revised definitions adopted in 2007, which identify as parents any man and woman living together, whether or not they are married or the child's biological parents."

The problem of illegitimacy and broken families had seemed intractable for decades, but the Census Bureau has been able to make a significant dent in it, at virtually no cost to the taxpayer, merely by redefining the word parents.

I have to remind myself that it's not the numbers that are lying.  What's wrong here are definitions.  Which has to do with language, with words.  

Although it's a handy reminder that language and mathematics are perhaps inextricably combined.  For isn't classifying items into sets a basic operation of mathematics?  And how do you do that without naming them?

In any case, shame on the NYT for reporting the "good news" uncritically in the lede, and burying deeper in the story, with almost comical understatement, the sleight-of-hand,  the redefinition of terms -- a really heinous one, a damned lie if I ever saw one.

(One hopes that the Census Bureau was still asking the right questions, so that the numbers are in fact there, somewhere, buried in the data, and that it was only in turning the numbers into the words of a press release, of a report, that the fudge occurred.  Otherwise -- if all they asked was, "is there a man and a woman residing at the same address as this child?" -- we'll never know, will we?)

This is awesome.

From the BBC:

When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated".

So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket.

Picture of the sign at the link.  

Here in the Twin Cities, we have substantial communities of Hmong and Somali as well as a large and growing number of Spanish speakers, and it isn't uncommon to see signs written in one or two or even all of these languages as well as English -- not many road signs or other government signs that I know of, except in St. Paul where signs in Hmong are surprisingly common, but local businesses hoping to attract everybody will put them up, and you will sometimes see them in medical clinic waiting rooms.  I know some people are bothered by the very idea of such things, but I like to read them, practicing my rudimentary Spanish skills and trying to find the linguistic patterns in the other languages.   

(And then there's the sort of thing that shows up in Desperate's tonier-than-mine neighborhood.)

Not counting the last one, I wonder how well these signs are translated.

The mistranslated-Welsh-sign meme seems to be a recurring one in Britain.   Perhaps Welsh government rules that signs must be bilingual (which is a very different thing from signs that local businesses put up freely) have an air of ridiculousness to them? 

I do not think this word means what you think it means.

Okay, what's up with "humbled?"

How is it that when someone receives recognition, honor, and/or praise, or perhaps a political endorsement from an admirable person, they are always saying "I'm humbled and honored?"

It is, by definition, impossible to be both "humbled" and "honored" by the same event.

One is humbled not by endorsement, but by criticism.  One is humbled not by winning, but by losing.  One is humbled not by being told how effing great you are, but by how greatly you've effed up.  It comes from the same root as "humility" and  "humiliated" for a reason.

I think perhaps that when someone speaks this way, they are hoping to be viewed as having "humbly accepted" the praise, and they think that they can create this view by spouting about how humbled they are as they are accepting it.  

Really humbly accepting an endorsement is much shorter and quieter.  It does not make a good sound bite.  It goes like this:  "Thank you, sir, I accept."

Humbled rarely announces itself.  Occasionally decorum and closure requires it.  The proper kind of announcement that you are "humbled" is gravely, in response to a setback; it accompanies the sort of statement that is referred to as an "admission."

(Yeah, this was inspired by Sen. Obama's response to the news that Gen. Powell had released a statement endorsing him, but it's a generic nonpartisan complaint.  Everybody does this nowadays, it's not even limited to politicians.)

God does not exist.

I mean, depending on how you look at it. 

(Which could be restated as "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.")

In one sense, "God does not exist" is an accurate formulation of a very specific piece of Judeo-Christian doctrine, using a materialist's set of definitions.

Google "universe definition" and you will find that in several places -- though it's not the only definition -- the universe is defined as something along the lines of

"the totality of all the things that exist."

 There is no reason why you can't use such a definition of "universe" for the purposes of your argument.  It's just one way of drawing the boundaries around your system.  Draw it one way to solve Problem 1, draw it another way to solve Problem 2, just make sure you draw it usefully each time.

OK, what's that mean then to Christians?  If you find yourself in a discussion with someone where the ground rules of your discussion -- you did  bother to lay out some ground rules, didn't you? -- include the identification of "existence" as "part of the universe?"  

Isn't it obvious?  You cheerfully and clearly state that God does not exist.  Right?

Because you, being Christian and not pantheist or atheist, believe that God made the universe and is not, therefore, a part of it.  We have always maintained that.  If the universe is the set of all things that exist, then, God doesn't exist.

God must, then, do something else.

Transcends existence, maybe?  

Anyway, my point is that there's no reason a Christian can't have a discussion about the existence of God with a materialist on the materialist's terms.  Just be clear about it.  You will get nowhere, either of you, if one has in his head "existence = physical existence and membership in the physically observable universe" and the other has "existence = all physical things and also metaphysical truths and spiritual entities." 

This is so even if what you are arguing about is the existence of, say, right triangles.

Pick one and argue on those grounds.  "If existence is defined as 'membership in the universe,' then, no, God doesn't exist.  I believe God's not part of the universe; God made the universe and everything in it.  So a more fundamental question is, could there be -- using the  term broadly, mind you -- anything besides the universe?"  (Good luck trying to construct your discussion, I might add, without using the verb 'to be.'  I suggest you have recourse to some other languages.)

Redefining your terms can have interesting results, at least in your head.  If existence is membership in the physical universe, then God doesn't exist (He does something different -- and why not?  Maybe that whole three-and-one-at-the-same-time thing works out better that way), and then, of course, neither do geometrical entities exist (have you ever seen a sphere?  I mean, a real sphere?), nor do emotions, or will, or ideas of any kind.  All those things, instead of "existing," do something different.  What is it they do?  Unwrap, and wrap your mind around it a new way, through a new use of your language.  Old familiar things look new:  the Incarnation, for instance.

Sooner or later, though, you're bound to come up against something that reminds you that you're really playing a game with words -- a profitable game, I think, and a fun one, but a game nonetheless.  Wait a minute.  Remember the divine NAME?  "I am who AM?"  Didn't He kind of, you know, make a point of saying "Existence is mine?"  Huh.  Maybe it's better to say it's the universe that does "the other thing."   Still, next time I find myself discussing Life, The Universe, and Everything with a materialist, it might be edifying to step onto his semantic grounds.  

P.S.  Yes, I was thinking about this before I read Anathem.