PZ Myers points out the disconnect between what scientists know and what we expect them to know. I discovered this, actually, at a pretty early age when I was shocked that my father, a mathematics professor, didn’t know the sum of 384759 and 294824 off the top of his head. Lots of folks, it seems to me, view science as a collection of facts, whereas scientists see it – correctly – as a process that is brought to bear on a collection of facts. This leads in turn to things like belief in UFOs and objecting to evolution on the basis that “it’s just a theory”.
A question of Method
It occurs to me that, in a lot of cases, rather than use a blogger’s commenting feature, if I have something to say I’ll actually post it here. Am I alone in this? How do you all decide between whether something warrants a quick comment on someone else’s blog versus a full-fledged post on your own?
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Potato, Po-tah-toe
I never saw the point of making fun of Dan Quayle for misspelling “potato”; in my experience, good spelling isn’t necessarily an indicator of intelligence. Or, more specifically, I’ve never found bad spelling to be a reliable indicator of low intelligence. One boss I worked under for five years is a highly intelligent man, very articulate and pretty well-read – but his spelling is utterly ghastly. Occasionally he would try to post a strongly-worded notice to the employees of our restaurant over some recent performance issue, and the only result would be that the employees would cluster around the notice and laugh at its level of bad spelling and grammar. I eventually told him that he’d better leave that stuff to me. (And since I’ve encountered the “smart-when-talking, dumb-when-writing” combination numerous times in my life, I wonder why this should be so. Stephen Pinker has probably covered this in one of his books on language and the brain, somewhere.)
Of course, all that is just preamble to my linking this, at which I admit laughing despite my statement above. I’m so ashamed. Stricken, even.
(That’s a great site, by the way. Take a few moments to explore the archives. Like this one: something tells me a sign like this at the boundary of Fangorn Forest might have saved Saruman a lot of grief, eh? Oh, and it’s all via I Love Everything.)
(UPDATE: Well, this is a first: I’ve managed to contribute to demolishing some poor site’s bandwidth, thus forcing its temporary removal from the Web! I’ll try to remember to resurrect this post next month, after the site in question returns.)
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Two words and a picture.
Squashing the Product-Hawkers
If you’re looking for ways of minimizing the advertising that is foisted upon you in the course of doing stuff online, Steven Den Beste has a couple of recommendations. I tend to do very little in terms of this kind of thing — basically, running EarthLink’s pop-up blocker is fine by me, although it’s a bit overzealous, frequently getting in the way of Javascripts that open new windows, and in terms of spam, I really don’t get a whole lot, thanks to AOL’s filters. Like SDB, I do get a lot of the “Help the President of Zimbabwe smuggle $50,000,000 out of the country” messages, and I see that mails for Viagra have given way to mails for Cialis, but that’s about it. In general, I actually seem to get less spam at my main inbox than real messages; although this is no doubt because I’m on a couple of fairly high-traffic lists (both for GMR staffers), the amount of spam that gets through isn’t debilitating at all. (At least, not yet.)
But SDB generally knows what he’s talking about with stuff like this, so if you’re looking for solutions to these kinds of problems, check out the two programs he recommends.
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Blogging versus “Real” Writing
Sean e-mailed me a link to this blog post a while back, and I duly bookmarked it and then completely forgot to address it. The basic thrust of the post seems to be that blogging isn’t really good for writers, in the sense that blogging helps them improve their writing, develop their relationships with editors, sell their stuff, streamline their prose, compose their ideas, and the like. Basically, blogging seems to be a kind of “cat-vacuuming”, just another activity used to avoid doing the real work, the actual heavy-lifting.
To an extent, this is true. I started my new job more than a month ago, and I’ve kept Byzantium’s Shores pretty regularly updated since then. But in that time – and here’s an admission I’m loath to make – I have committed fewer than 1,000 words to The Promised King, Book II: The Finest Deed. That’s pretty ugly. In fact, it’s downright embarrassing and unacceptable. While there are pressures of learning a new job, as well as getting myself up to speed in a new organization staffed by more than 300 people, and while there have been other things to do (I can’t just stop reading, especially when I have items for which reviews are expected by various websites), the fact is, aside from blogging, I have spent almost no time since starting the new job writing, except in the sense of mulling over plot-details while wheeling carts around.
And yet, I keep updating here. Why? Well, because it is easier to focus on doing this than on doing that, or at least it has been. But the nagging sense of disquiet is growing, and it’s time to get back to the writing that really matters. No, that doesn’t mean I plan to slacken my efforts here. It does mean, however, that I’m going to get back to squeezing writing from the time that is given me.
To get back to the linked post above, I’m not sure that blogging is bad for writing, although I am no published writer, so my opinion on this really isn’t worth much, I suspect. To me, blogging for the last month has been the equivalent, say, of the kinds of exercises a person who engages in regular weight-training might do when they go on a long business trip and can’t get to a gym in the meantime. Blogging might not keep every writing muscle sharp, but at the same time, it keeps all of them from going into atrophy; and besides, I’ve always viewed blogging as kind of a side-venture that helps writing in other ways: it’s another source for grist that I can feed into my own particular mill. I doubt very much, for example, that I’d have ever read Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds had Will Duquette not reviewed it (and had I not been reading his blog in the first place).
So, is blogging a waste of writing time? I’m not really sure. It could be, I suppose, if I define it in terms of a strict accounting of minutes logged writing the novel or a story in terms of minutes spent writing posts for Byzantium’s Shores. But then, I’ve never been much for strictly tallying the minutes of my life.
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I’m sure barging into the conference room before Mr. Trump called her had nothing to do with it….
Via the Libertarian Jackass, I see that recently-departed Apprentice contestant Omarosa wants to have is still insisting that she was the victim of racism. Well, maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t – but I’m not about to take seriously the ravings of a person who thinks that the old canard about “the pot calling the kettle black” is a statement about race.
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All Pings Welcome!
I’ve made it standard practice to ping Weblogs.com for about a year now whenever I post. This, I am told, allows services like BlogRolling to know when I’ve updated, so I show up on BlogRolling-powered blogrolls as sporting new posts. And since I tend to do all my posting for a given day in one shot, my typical practice is to write a couple of posts, publish them, and ping Weblogs.com; then I’ll write a few more posts and publish those, but not ping Weblogs.com until hours later. In this way, I get two pings out of a single round of updates. I have no idea if this helps generate traffic or if it’s just a useless scheme I’ve cooked up, but it seems harmless.
Except that I’ve discovered that at least over the last couple of days, Weblogs.com has been accepting my pings even though I have made no changes to Byzantium’s Shores in the interim. I pinged a short while ago, with nothing new published here since the last time I pinged (on Friday), and it went through just fine. Hmmmmmm. (This could all just be meaningless blather on my part, as well. Ya never know.)
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No! I won’t do it! You can’t make me!
I have personally gone to great effort to remove a certain bit of wardrobe-related knowledge from my brain, but Andrew Cory brings it screaming back. Dammit! (The article of clothing in question is, to my way of thinking, the most spectacularly evil and useless item in the entire world of clothing. That is, considering only the stuff I’d ever have to wear. I’m certain that women can lay claim to all manner of items of at least equal evil value, starting with high heels.)
At least the page Andrew links is written with a “Yeah, this sucks, but if you’re unfortunate enough to need it, here it is” tone.
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Talking Good, versus Speaking Well
Here are a couple of language-related goodies I’ve found lately:
:: First, some handy new terms for the workplace that I hadn’t seen before, such as “Seagull Manager” (every organization seems to have a member of Upper Management whose only function is to behave in this way) and “Irritainment” (not work-related, really, but reading certain blogs, such as Kim Du Toit’s, can be described thusly).
BTW, the linked list is apparently edited down from a longer list! I want to see the whole thing.
:: Second, via I Love Everything, here’s a list of words that are either very commonly mispronounced (“February”) or words that simply do not exist (“irregardless”). While I’m generally less anal about precision in language than many people I know (my view tends to be that you can’t stop language from changing and evolving, unless you kill all speakers), I do have my linguistic pet-peeves and thus I’m thrilled to see “Orientate” listed as a non-existent word. You don’t “orientate” yourself to the sun, and you don’t “orientate” new employees, people! Sheesh!
(It turns out that Languagehat hates this list, and points out a few errors.)