Spotted this notice in the toilet at my doctor’s surgery the other day. How to murder the language! Well it amused me!
Category Archives: thoughts
Zen Mischievous Moments #131
Giraffe’s necks and Golden Gate Bridge
[It seems] an appropriate moment to introduce readers to the unusual unit converter discovered … at http://www.weirdconverter.com/. This enables you to convert from one unusual unit to another. Sadly, in the “weight” section “male polar bear” is listed, but there is no baby elephant, only a fully grown one. Even so, you may be interested to know that one African elephant equals 12.24790343434 polar bears. There is also a “length/height” section which reveals, for instance, that one Golden Gate Bridge equals 720 giraffe’s necks.
[New Scientist; 28/07/2007]
Excessive DUST?!
Absolutely brilliant — so much so it is stretching my credulity neurons.
As @j-sin syas: I’ve lived in the UK long enough to know that this is the only country where “leaves on the track” stop our trains but this seemed a new level of sillyness. Was the dust “high in fat or low in fat” I wonder?
Friendship
I’ve just come back from a couple of days in Somerset attending the funeral of one of my closest friends. Although old enough to be my father, Victor was 82 when he died a couple of weeks ago, we had been friends for almost 35 years since we met when we were both post-grad students: he doing an MA in Art History, me just starting on my doctorate in Chemical Spectroscopy. In the year we spent together at university we became close friends; so close that when Victor’s wife died a couple of years back I was asked to be the celebrant at her funeral, and this week I gave the funeral oration for Victor – which was well received.
How nice then to return to find the following quote (attributed to Muhammad Ali) in my email:
Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.
I’ll perhaps write more about Victor later; as I said in my eulogy, he was a great man.
Terrorism
I have never yet blogged about terrorism. And I am not going to start now. To do so would be to give the perpetrators one of the things they desire: attention. The best solution is to get on with life and leave the law to deal with criminals.
Depressed
I’m tired. Horribly tired. Not coping. Don’t know how I’m managing to do anything. Having anxiety dreams. Depressed. Very depressed. Despite the anti-depressants. And it isn’t even winter when I know I do struggle. I don’t know why. Noreen says I’m doing too much; I’m always doing things which are “duty” and that I haven’t had a break in weeks. I guess she’s right, what with work, the Anthony Powell Society, sorting my father’s estate, and the trust, and my mother’s tax, and …
… and this weekend a very close friend died; the other end of the country. Well Victor was 82; he had heart problems and Parkinson’s; was old enough to be my father; and was my best man all those years ago. Although we talked only infrequently, I shall miss Victor; he was the nearest person I knew, probably ever will know, to being a true polymath. So now I must give time not just to his funeral (and that may mean taking the funeral service) but to his estate, because I am one of his executors, and I promised. (Oh and just as I did for his wife when she died a couple of years ago.)
But all I am doing is things which I have committed to do; it’s not as if I’m taking on anything new; but I still can’t keep up. At 56 I’m working harder than ever before, at a time when the system is no longer full of it’s youthful vigour – we none of us can do at 56 what we could at 26, leave alone at 16; simple biology.
So it’s no wonder I never get a break and I’m tired and depressed. And as Noreen also tells me I don’t spend any time “playing” – by which she means doing what I want to do, when I want to. How can I; there’s no time!
What’s the answer? A big lottery win so I can afford to retire? Sounds good. If only!
Zen Mischievous Moments #130
Another piece from this week’s New Scientist but this time from a mainline article.
The article is titled The Last Place on Earth … and gives 17 examples of the last place you can find various “things”. I print the whole of number 7 below, it is so off the wall.
The last place on earth where you can still hear the strangest languages
ever spoken
The death of any language is a tragedy, but some are a more distressing loss than others. A handful of endangered languages are the last refuges of odd linguistic features that, once their host language disappears, will be gone forever.One is Tofa, spoken by a handful of nomads in the Eastern Sayan mountains of southern Siberia. Starting in the 1950s, the Soviet government forced the Tofa people to learn Russian and abandon their traditional ways of life. Now, there are only 25 Tofa speakers left, all elderly. When they die, one utterly unique feature of Tofa will disappear: a suffix, -sig, that means “to smell like”. In Tofa you can add -sig to the word ivi-, (reindeer) to describe someone who smells like a reindeer. No other language in the world is known to have this kind of suffix.
Linguist K David Harrison of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has documented similar examples of endangered “information packaging” systems in his book When Languages Die. One of these is the body counting system used in an estimated 40 languages in Papua New Guinea. In languages like Kaluli and Kobon, the words for numbers are the names of body parts. So 1 to 10 in Kobon are “little finger, ring finger, middle finger, forefinger, thumb, wrist, forearm, inside elbow, bicep, shoulder”. To count higher, you count the collarbone and the hollow at the base of the throat – and then right down the other side, all the way to 23. You can count to 46 by counting back the other way and even higher by starting over and doing it all again. So 61 in Kobon is “hand turn around second time go back biceps other side”.
Quote: Monotheism
Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything just give him time to rationalize it.
[Robert Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice]
Naked Cyclists
Nice little piece today on BBC News about naked and near-naked cyclists protesting in London and elsewhere about traffic and climate change. Lovely quote at the end:
Bikes and naked bodies harm nobody. Car fumes … are driving us all to climate chaos.
But I’m miffed that I missed it. I would have been there.
Mass Circumcision to Fight AIDS
Here we go! I did warn you.
There was a BBC News item yesterday under the above title tells of a mass programme to circumcise males in Africa because doing so reduces AIDS rates (in males!) by 60%.
Effectively they start by “offering” the procedure to all boys born in hospital. But how long will it before adult & adolescent males are being “offered” the operation; just as men in India were bribed into vasectomies some years back. I put “offering” in quotes because I have no doubt that the offer will be heavy handed and not exactly optional.
I find this type of attitude obscene in today’s world (no, any world). Mutilation of someone, for any reason, when they themselves cannot opt out is to me a violation of human rights and an abuse. The medical profession really should know better. There would be outrage if the equivalent operation was “offered” to females — indeed there is outrage, because it is done to females (tho’ not as an anti-AIDS measure).
Oh yes, and what about the women? Circumcising men does nothing to reduce the chances of a female catching AIDS from an infected male.
Come on guys. Let’s have some medical responsibility — in the round! A little holistic thinking. Let’s find proper ways to tackle AIDS and not resort to barbaric, medieval, mutilation. And let’s stop name-calling against those who don’t agree with you, too.