Archive for September, 2007
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New-fangled word boundaries
Gary Feng notes that hyphens are going out of style in British English. Hyphens are, it seems to me, an interesting intermediary step on the way to word hood, word-hood, wordhood. The Onion uses hyphens to good effect to give an air of antiquity to certain of their pieces, such as this one.
I’d say their odds of success are no better than fifty-fifty.
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I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
For some reason, this struck me as a great way to concentrate my mind, macabre as it indisputably is. So now my Mac tray icons on both laptop and desktop display a countdown timer (I couldn’t get it to say “Days until dead,” but that’s actually okay). Assuming that I live until my next birthday, and taking the longevity tables at face value, I can expect to have 9333 days left. I figure I’ll adjust it each succeeding year on my birthday, which should involve getting some amount of time back, since I’ve lived until that point.
But it’s not that much time. If you accept his argument that any project takes 5 years, and given that I’ve just started a new major project, that gives me 3 more rounds of work, more or less. Although a certain amount of parallel processing might be possible.
Samuel Johnson wrote that “the immediate prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully.” I don’t know if a digital reminder of longevity will do the same.
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Mac Progress
I’m nearly done with the transition to the Mac OS. While I still fondly remember the days when I could do things like print a document, most of the problems have been resolved (including a weird disappearing email issue).
I am still at least a bit ambivalent about the Mac OS vs. Vista, and about the big hot and heavy MacBook Pro I got vis a vis what Lenovo produces, I really love the 24 inch iMac that I have in my office. And bit by bit, as I find software that allows me to customize this world (latest example, Letterbox), it seems viable.
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H.S.K.
Someday, I’d like to study for and take this test, the Chinese equivalent of the TOEFL and/or TSE. As this report describes it’s being revised, probably in ways that would make it more appropriate for someone like me, and also more like the Test of Spoken English that Chinese students coming to the U.S. take.
Still, I was taken aback at this line: “The new H.S.K. couldn’t care less about 成语.”
Chengyu seem so central to speaking Chinese, that I wonder how far that could really be the case.
What can you do? 观言察行...
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Negotiable and contestable
James Fallows points to a discussion of the popular book by the cringe-inducing Tom Friedman (my adjective, not his), by UCLA economist Edward Leamer, which can be downloaded here.
Very interesting and entertaining discussion of the myriad things that it might mean for the world to be “flat”, and how nearly all of them are either wrong or nonsensical (or both!).
I found his discussion toward the end (read the whole thing) about negotiable vs. contestable jobs/business relationships to be very interesting. In short, your typical job is a negotiable relationship (your employer did not, for example, say to the whole world: “I want someone who can teach these course and do this research, submit bids and I’ll take the best deal”). But that’s what happens in a contestable relation, as when you buy some standardized product from someone anywhere in the world with whom you have no lasting relationship. To some extent, what once involved negotiable relationships has now moved into the sphere of contestable ones, which is what I thought was the point of Friedman’s book.
My favorite discussion of Friedman relates to reports on a visit to China, described here.
I should also say that I really liked his earlier books, From Beirut to Jerusalem (although I really wonder about a few of his quotes) and, to a lesser extent, the Lexus and the Olive Tree, although he was already starting the downward cycle that has led him to the state where he’s the self-parodying father of the “Friedman unit“
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Inbox zero day
An inbox is not a very good way to manage a task list. This has slowly dawned on me, crystallized by this excellent talk by Merlin Mann. For quite a while, I’ve been carrying around a load of residual emails and tasks that, with difficulty, I could get below 100. As part of moving to a Mac and planning to move away from the Mac outlook equivalent (called “Entourage”), I decided to try to implement these ideas. I’m using a development version of a program called Omnifocus to keep track of tasks, and I have now, as of this morning, either taken care of everything in my inbox or set it up as a task and filed the email message (this may explain why some of you have heard from me recently…).
It’s a nice way to start the new school year. From now on I plan to either deal with email right away for things that can be done in less than two minutes, file it somewhere based on when I will be able to respond, or turn it into a task. We’ll see how it goes.