10/26/10 Packrat
"Don't throw that out, it might come in handy some day." Sound like anyone you know? Maybe you? Taken to the extreme this is the philosophy of the packrat.
Take the true case of Mr. S who saved everything because "well, you never know." His house was all rooms with no room, just pathways between piles of stuff. Toys, broken televisions, non-working radios, newspapers, lumber, empty cottage cheese containers... anything and everything whether valuable or not. Mostly not. He never trading in cars, just stored the worn out models on the property. Though if you peered into his garage you'd never know there were cars inside under all the other junk. Mr. S was the quintessential packrat.
Why do they do it, you might wonder. My guess is anti-wastefulness, the notion it's a shame to discard what is still good. Or at least not utterly rotted to the core. So instead of sending it to a landfill they keep their own private indoor landfill in the hope that sometime-or-other, somehow-or-other to someone-or-other "it might come in handy."
Even if not themselves, "somebody could use this" they imagine. What's lacking is a distribution system. Enter the garage sale. Or if they hope to fool people into thinking their junk is somehow valuable they call it an estate sale. Though your hardcore packrat only submits to a garage sale at the cajolery of relatives.
You might wonder, what's the difference between a packrat and a collector.
Firstly, collecting is an activity, the collector goes out and gets. Packrattery is a lack of activity, packrats just let thing pile up. Second is selectivity, collectors collect specific things, packrats just accumulate everything. Next is worth, collectors usually have an eye on value, packrats merely consider if it "might come in handy some day." Lastly, collectors usually organize, display and keep their collections clean, packrats not so much.
Which brings up a few last questions. Do you have a guest bedroom no guest ever uses but is basically a storehouse for all your junk? If so, is it really a guest bedroom or a big closet? Can you not get the car into the garage because of all the "gear" in there? Do you have a storage unit which mainly contains stuff you don't really need or use? If so, you just might be a packrat.
10/4/10 It is What it is, Whatever it is
Warm blooded animals, mammals and birds, have four limbs. People have two arms and two legs, birds two wings and two legs, cows, cats, dogs and such have four legs. Many cold-blooded animals also have four limbs, but many have six, eight, or many more. Crabs, shrimp, insects, and so on. Seems the bigger the brain the fewer the limbs. Which is not a hard and fast rule as snakes have no limbs at all and none are Mensa members. It appears to take more co-ordination and more brains to walk on two legs than four than six than eight than etc.
Now then, can a tail or a nose be a limb? How about animals with a prehensile tail used for grabbing like a monkey for instance? What about an animal with a prehensile nose? You know, elephants. Are they five-limbed? After all you don't need to walk on it for it to be a limb. People don't walk on their hands, as a rule. There's no real point in answering these questions, which are more a preamble to a riddle Abe Lincoln used to repeat.
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?
Four. No matter what you call it, a tail is not a leg.
9/1/10 A Silly Bit For no Good Reason Other Than I Wanted to and Don't Have a Copier or Fax
Click to enlarge
How often do goofy ideas pop into your head? Would they amuse anyone else? What do you do with them? In the old days you might try turning them into copier humor passing them around on paper. Later this became fax humor. Now-a-days we have the internet to make it faster and easier to share these silly things with email and blogs.
Of course the "old days" mentioned started in the 1970s. Before that, you just kept it to yourself. Which, in many cases might be just the place to keep it.
7/20/10 English English
If you've ever listened to news from the BBC you'll have heard a phrase which to American ears sounds odd, but is A-OK to the rest of the English-speaking world. Something along the lines of:
Joe Dokes was sent to hospital.
In the U.S. we'd say "to the hospital" not "to hospital." Like I say, Americans find the British way tinny to the ear, almost ungrammatical or like something spoken by someone who's first language was not English. But is it so odd? After all, "Joe Dokes went to school" sounds right. "Joe Dokes went to the school" sounds right, too, but means something else.
Then again, after getting out Joe went home. Not went to home or went to the home, just went home. Though if Joe were old and released from (the) hospital he could have gone home to the home. The retirement home, that is. There Joe might either lie in bed or lie on the couch. Or is that lay on the couch? In any case Joe doesn't lie in couch, always on the couch. Though he can lie (or lay) on the bed or in bed or even in the bed, which all mean about the same thing.
Though a younger Joe would return to his job where he'd be at work or at the office and never at the work or at office. On the other hand, in office isn't the same as in the office. Elected officials are in office even when they're not in the office but at home in bed.
Now then, Joe can be in school without being in the school. The first means he's a student, the second he's at a school building whether a student or not. This explains the British usage where in hospital means Joe is a patient, while in the hospital would mean Joe could be a doctor or visitor and is in the building. The latter use would even apply to a thing, as in the MRI machine was in the hospital, while it would never be in hospital. Yet if broken could be in the shop and not in shop.
Perhaps all this seem inconsistent. What rules cover all this I don't know. I guess grammar is in the ear of the beholder and might vary from place to place. Even if you don't know the rules, some things just sound right or wrong. After all, as children we learn to speak properly without being taught rules of grammar until we get to school. And even then all those rules don't always soak in, but we can still speak grammatically anyway.
As a final bit of triviality, being freelance I work at home. Though some folks would say I work from home. I guess both are right, but the first sounds righter than the second to me. Though maybe the word "righter" doesn't sound right to anyone.
6/22/10 Ah-h-h-h, Summer!
Summer has arrived marked by the longest day and the shortest night of the year. Which doesn't mean I worked more and slept less. Nor does this year's longest day mark "The Longest Day", D-Day. Which, being June 6th, was not the longest day of 1944. Nor was it the longest day because it had an extra D to start it.
Depending where you live the length of the longest day may be longer or shorter. The farther north the longer it is. If you live at the Arctic circle you will be in the Land of the Midnight Sun where the sun doesn't set at all. In which case the longest day lasts all day and the shortest night would be tomorrow night because there wasn't a night tonight. I think that makes sense.
Now then, if you lived at the north pole you'd be Santa Claus or an elf. In which case it'd still be summer though no day at the beach.
4/5/10 Going Fast Fast
I had my own experience with sudden acceleration years ago when going to art school in Detroit. Not in a Toyota or Audi, but in a 1963 Chevy van. I was on my way back to class after lunch when suddenly the van just took off. After the initial surprise I jammed on the brakes. Soon enough the braking stalled the engine.
It was pretty hair-raising and heart-pounding though over pretty quickly, in a matter of seconds if memory serves. Still, you can cover quite a bit of ground in a few seconds in a run-away 1963 Chevy van. Luckily I was on a wide one-way street with no other traffic or lights or stop signs so I didn't hit anyone or anything.
What I discovered had happened was the bolts holding the cross-member under the transmission broke. As a result the transmission dropped pitching the engine up jamming the accelerator open. I suppose I should have blamed GM for making a faulty vehicle where this could happen. Then again, the van was 20 years old. Perhaps I should have blamed the local road authorities for salting the roads in winter which caused the bolts to rust away in the first place.
I'll call ABC News and see if they can investigate. Thirty years isn't than long ago, is it?
3/17/10 Searching...Searching...Searching...
What's with the computers in television crime labs? Do they really need to display every fingerprint or face it's trying to match in its database? Why would the monitor show and reject each non-matching one with a black bar reading 'No Match' and make a little 'bink' sound as it does it? Wouldn't that drive the lab workers crazy?
I mean, when you do a search function on your computer does it display what does not match? What would be the point? Can the computer only "see" if something matches by "looking" at it on the monitor? All a computer really understands is zeros and ones, the screen display is for the user. Are these crime lab folks staring at their computer as it goes through hundreds of fingerprints looking for a match which the computer stops at automatically anyway?
This reminds me of moviedom computers in the old days which 'beepity-booped' and had banks of blinking lights. Which were for what, exactly? They randomly blinked but didn't display any information at all. About all they did was show the computer was working, and at what speed. How is that helpful?
Actually, I can tell you how it's helpful. It's eye candy for the viewing audience. It's TV, after all.
3/4/10 For Every Action There's an Unequal and Tangential Reaction
Dude: "Hey, Jones cheated."
Guy: "Yeah, well Smith cheated, too."
Sound familiar? You may have witnessed a similar exchange one time or another. Could be about sports or games, could be politics, or could be life in general. Is Guy's retort a good one? Right off the bat it's two fallacy arguments, and depending on the particulars possibly three or four.
First, it's a red herring. There is no defense of Jones' cheating at all. Instead a different issue is raised, Smith cheating. Guy's response might as well have been, "Yeah, well you're ugly."
Second, Guy's response implies since Smith cheated then Jones' cheating is excusable. Which is nothing but a tu quoque fallacy, or "two wrongs make a right". Tu quoque is Latin for "you too". In Latin or English cheating is cheating whether one person does it or everyone does.
It's like saying, "Dude burned down Guy's house and Guy burned down Dude's house so they're even, no harm done." Well, harm was done because each lost a house. Like your mom always told you, "Two wrongs don't make a right." Now, your mom might have also said a lot of things not quite so logical, but in this case she was spot on.
Then again, what if Dude's house was a mansion and Guy's was a shack. Are they even? While I said before cheating is cheating, there are little cheats and big cheats. To say there's no difference between the two is the fallacy of the beard (Continuum Fallacy): the argument you cannot come to a conclusion because one thing differs from another only in degree. (The name derives from the difficulty of determining when exactly someone has a beard as opposed to whiskers.)
Lastly, Guy is invoking the old "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" defense. However, Guy implies something that's not been established. If Dude never defended Smith's cheating then he never threw any stones to begin with. Guy's response then amounts to a straw man argument against a position Dude never took. A classic straw man type argument is, "Executing murderers won't bring the victims back to life." True enough, but who ever claimed it would?
Let's rephrase the initial exchange and toss in all the fallacies. In the following case Guy's reply amounts to four logical fallacies in one statement. No mean feat, what?
Dude: "Hey, Jones just stole my car."
Guy: "You can't complain, Smith stole my pruning shears."