Two Dishes But To One Table

I'd Rather Be Hunting Seals

It is probably more fun to paddle a kayak than it is to use Kayak.com but having said that, I am sort of enjoying my first try.  Check out how many sites it can search simultaneously:

Watching this many windows running is a sort of miracle for anyone who remembers crashing a pre-Pentium computer because you tried to, say, check your email on Pine at the same time that you were opening a 256K Jpeg on HotBot.

Alter Mann im Berg und Guilder

The New Hampshire commemorative quarter is a fitting immortalization of the now-gone rock.
I realized the other day, considering that coins easily survive from several millenia ago, as physical objects go, coinage is the gold standard of commemoralization.
So the old man in the mountain will ironically now live forever in its new diminuitive form.    And of course the actual site on the mountain persists, albeit smoother,with, to an art fan, a sort of  "erased de Kooning" significance.

Java Jonesin' in January; I Already Bought the Sam's 24 Hour Textbook.

Forgive me for not trusting that my university is up to date with the times, but I did a quick survey to see whether the real job listings for computer jobs are in synch with the classes that are being taught by professors at Hunter.  So here are the most desirable computer languages which a job seeker in my city should study.

In ascending order, here are how many  job ads on Craig's List mentioned a given computer language.

ERLANG 0 /  1
PERL 5/20
RUBY  6 /15
python  9 /16
c++   12/15 
PHP 14 / 60
JAVA 38/  72
SQL 55 / 117

I looked at the ads posted on NYC.CL between December 9 and December 19, 2008. The pairs of numbers are for "software jobs" / "all jobs".

Is Humility in the Decalogue Anywhere?

I was thinking last month about what one usually declares in public when it is time to "Be Thankful". There are certain cliches: my kids, my job, visits from so and so. But what about something more humble, something that is located within our ego, not without.

I think we should have enough humility to thank God for the things in the core of our ego that we think of as being "us", like let's say "literacy", "magnanimity", "kindness" ... these things that we think of as intrinsically our personal good traits, I think we should not act like we made them through our sweat and will power; they are more appropriately to be thanked for as something bestowed, not something that we deserved or had coming to us.  That would be a more rending, poignant, stirring prayer.

HBO a la Mode

Students should demand to watch DVD's of cable TV shows for their language classes.  It's better than learning to say "The pen is on the table" or "When  does the train arrive?"  And there is a TON of it out there.  In almost any language.

When I was in Taiwan, for instance, I noticed that their television did the admirable job of translating "South Park" into Mandarin.  I would love to hear a native speaker comment on how good a job they did.  I'm going to assume they slipped into the local dialect, Taiwanese, to get the more 'earthy' points across.

Personally, although I barely know any foreign languages, I was entranced last night by two straight hours of The Wire with French subtitles turned on.  One of the things I learned was that an anguished string of F-Words and sacrilegious phrases in English can be reduced to Je nes crois pas ("I can't believe this").

And imagine how cool it would be to hear Donald Trump saying "You're fired!" in German...

What I Learned About Love From Gilligan's Island

Having a partner (girlfriend/boyfriend) is like having an outrigger on a canoe.  Don't second guess the presence of the outrigger!  It may seem like slower paddling, extra weight, and less maneuverability.  But you have to realize that your canoe will go farther because now it can’t flip over. 

You won't have much chance crossing open water if you don’t permanently attach a good outrigger to your canoe. 

Image from http://inventioninspirations.blogspot.com/

It Depends on Your Definition of "The"

Data nuts can't resist looking for patterns in words.  Though the election is over, you still may be interested in what the raw data says about the NYTimes, WaPost, & WSJ.  Did they give uneven treatment to the two candidates?  Yes, for the first two papers.  The language, pronouns and syntax all showed a big difference in the flavor of how the New York Times and Washington Post covered Senator McCain.  (News coverage language analysis.)

Slicing and dicing the words of the candidates themselves, from the third debate also gives some interesting results.

Category	Examples	McCain	Obama	Interpretation
Word count		6596	7339	Obama talks more
Words per sentence		13.83	18.39	Obama longer sentences
Big words (over 6 letters)		17.77	18.72	Obama bigger words
Personal pronouns		10.22	9.22	McCain more personal in general

The complete table of candidate language analysis from the third presidential debate is here: University of Texas.

Did You Like 'Post Office' ?

After work tonight, I spoke to Kevin about books:
"If you were on the newlywed game, what would you say is your wife's favorite author?"
"That's easy:  Jane Eyre or Jane Austen...whichever one of those is the author, not the character."
"So we can say she's not into, say, Charles Bukowski books? How about you, you like Chuck?"
"I think I know him; the mode is chaos, right?"
"I think that's a good one-word summary."
"Then put me down for 'no'.  I'm either not smart enough or not stupid enough for Bukowski."

2000 shoppers at 5AM

Jdimytai Damour of Valley Stream NY, rest in peace.

Bag News Notes
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Photos at Flickr.