Nothing But Words

I’ve been an astronomy buff all my life, but I’ve never seen a total solar eclipse. There’s going to be a total solar eclipse in two days, but you need to be in Brazil, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, or the Middle East to see it. I came across this very cool map of where to see total eclipses between 2001-2025. The next one that will be visible in the US is in 2017, so mark your calendars .

This article explains what it’s like to witness a solar eclipse, and why they’re visible only within paths that are typically thousands of miles long but only about 100 miles wide:

Only during totality can one observe the pearly white solar corona, as well as the ruddy chromosphere, and prominences – sights that are normally hidden from our view by the brilliant light of the Sun. In addition, darkness similar to 20 or 30 minutes after sundown suddenly falls over the surrounding landscape, allowing the brighter stars and planets to appear while strange and exotic colors rim the horizon…The regions from where the spectacular sight of a totally eclipsed Sun can be seen, however, are strictly confined to a narrow track; the path that the dark central shadow of the Moon (called the “umbra”) traces out over the Earth’s surface. That track may run for thousands of miles, yet may average less than a hundred miles in width. So while the dark lunar shadow might sweep over the Earth twice over a span of just three years, for a specific geographical location, the odds of lying directly in the path of that shadow is very small.

Here’s something I’d like for my birthday – The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World. I haven’t studied a foreign language since high school, but one thing I remember enjoying was learning words and expressions that had no exact equivalent in English. From what I can tell this book is a collection of such words from around the world. Here are a few samples from a description of the book:

Olfrygt – how the Danish describe the nagging fear of being unable to find a beer while out of town

Neko-neko – the Indonesian word for someone with a novel idea that actually makes the situation worse

Tingo – in Pascuense, to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by borrowing them

An acquaitance forwarded this link to me: PTO Requests Model of Warp Drive Invention. There’s another post with some more background. Considering some of the other ridiculous patents that have been awarded (not to mention silly trademarks), I guess they figured it was worth a shot.

Is it me, or does the guy who runs the patent law blog look way too earnest in his photo?

Over the past few weeks Russia has been having its coldest weather in 50 years, with temperatures in Moscow “…hovering between 4 and 29 degrees below zero F.” While some have experimented with a variety of new ways to stay warm…

…many Russians are resorting to a more traditional ritual to stay warm: drinking a few shots of vodka. Sales of alcoholic beverages soared by 30 percent over the past week, according to the Moscow-based National Alcohol Association. And in the town of Yaroslavl, about 180 miles north of Moscow, an elephant went berserk and ripped his cage apart after zookeepers fed it a bucket of vodka in an attempt to help it feel warmer.

A while back I tried to come up with a new title for my blog, but couldn’t think of anything I liked, and eventually gave up on it. Then last night I was listening to C-Tec while washing the dishes and heard the lyric “My wisdom is nothing but words,” and it clicked. For me it’s the perfect blog title, suggesting ambiguously facetious self-deprecation, which is a space where much of my sense of humor comes from – to the extent I’m funny, anyway . I Googled it, and was surprised to find no one has laid claim to it yet (at least as far as I could tell, it’s hard to know for sure since it’s a common phrase).

And I think the subtitle should effectively pre-empt any smart alec remarks about my pictures .

When we were in Japan last year, I got a kick out of the “smoking etiquette” posters that were on the trains (here’s a picture I took of one). Maria came across a couple more on the web the other day, and – looking at them again – I was a bit perplexed. Googling around, I found others describing them as anti-smoking posters, but they are not anti-smoking, they are anti rude smoking. Unlike the US, smoking never went out of style in Japan, but like the US, second-hand smoke and littering have become big issues. So it turns out these posters aren’t made by a government or non-profit organization – they’re actually ads by Japan Tobacco. The best US analogy would be beer companies running ads imploring folks to “drink responsibly.” I found the JT online gallery of all the posters in the series. These are my favorites:

That was a long and unplanned interruption in my blogging. Between an ongoing lack of sleep, the start of my class, and trying to meet a deadline at work, the blog has suffered. I’ll probably post less frequently until Eidan starts sleeping through the night, which he’ll hopefully start doing when he’s about 3 months old. But I’ll try to avoid going this long without a post again.

Today’s trivia: I should explain my greeting “ahoy!” For years I’ve used it in emails and IM. It was Alexander Graham Bell’s preferred phone greeting, but it lost out to “hello,” which Edison preferred. My feeling is that the electronic medium calls for a different greeting (I don’t have a profound philosophical justification for this – “hello” in the written form just feels too flat as a greeting, especially for IM). Apparently English is the only language where the greeting used in-person and on the phone is the same, so it’s not unusual to have different greetings for different contexts. According to this NPR story, “hello” likely comes from “halloo” (also a nautical greeting) and caught on as an in-person greeting and as a phone greeting around the same time, in the 1880s (the phone was invented in the 1870s).

This is a hilarious spoof of all those Ken Burns PBS documentaries: The Old Negro Space Program. It’s also a great demonstration of how you can create a great short film using just still pictures, a few talking heads, Photoshop, and some imagination.

Walking from the train to my office this morning, it slowly dawned on me that the 80s Go-go’s song Vacation was playing on an endless, interminable loop in my still half-asleep brain. I don’t think I’ve heard that song in probably 10 years, so I was wondering how it managed to worm its way into my head. Then I remembered a dream I had last night: the Go-go’s were in one of those 60s Gidget beach movies, and they were going to play a concert on the beach. But there was a problem: everyone in the band was only 2 inches tall. All the cool kids didn’t care they were small, so it was up to the requisite uncool/unfun girl on the beach to lecture the Lilliputian Go-go’s on the reality of the situation: the Lifeguards won’t let you play because they’re worried someone will step on you, and besides, since your amplifiers are miniature too, no one will be able to hear you.

I don’t know if the world would be a better or worse place if we could more easily tap into our subconscious while awake. But I can tell you this: it would definitely be a funnier place.

I’m feeling ambivalent about my new blog title. First I need to reveal how I came up with it: it’s an anagram of my name. So I think it’s clever, but I’m also thinking it’s just too goofy. There are other amusing anagrams of my name, but none of them are really blog title material: “a CIA hemp plot,” “eat a milch pop,” “a polemic path,” “thelamic pope,” “Alcoa the pimp,” and – if you include my middle name – “metaethical crepe porn,” “ham protein receptacle,” and “reelect maniac prophet.” I got all these from an anagram generator, btw, as word games are not my strong suit.

I’ll keep the new title for now, but I’ll see if I can think of something else.