Baba Brinkman has recast the Pardoner’s Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as a rap song, illustrated by Erik Brinkman. It actually works very well.
You can read the original in modern or Middle English.
Category: Writing
Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion
Uniqueness is binary
Reading through various climate change reports, I am reminded of a linguistic error that has long annoyed me. Specifically, it is the use of moderating adjectives before the word ‘unique.’ Uniqueness is fundamentally a binary distinction; the Hope Diamond and Mount Everest are unique because they are singular and irreplaceable things. It is logically nonsensical for something to be ‘fairly’ unique, and it is redundant to call something ‘completely’ unique. Likewise, it is impossible to be ‘quite uniquely situated.’
From a slightly broader perspective, it is worth noting how the prevalence of adjectives diminishes both the variety and power of nouns in language. This is particularly true for expressions of degree like ‘very’ and ‘extremely.’ I try to avoid them, though it cannot always be managed.
Proofread
This afternoon, my mother kindly passed along a list of 28 minor spelling and grammatical errors in my thesis. Curiously, there seems to be an direct correlation between the number of people who read a particular chapter and the number of errors. The same goes for the length of time that passed between writing and submission. 25 of the 28 errors are in the three chapters for which Dr. Hurrell gave me comprehensive feedback.
- Chapter 1: 8 errors
- Chapter 2: 9 errors
- Chapter 3: 8 errors
- Chapter 4: 1 error
- Chapter 5: 2 errors
Chapter two was the single most edited of the lot, with 25 major revisions prior to the one submitted. This seems to confirm the Law of Editing: “For each correction or clarification made, an equal and opposite error will be inadvertently introduced.”
Since the thesis is 30,000 words long, the version that will reside in the Bodleian has about one error per thousand words. The PDF that I will put online once the thesis has been graded will be better, and probably more widely consulted. For those with access to the appropriate restricted pages on the wiki, the corrected version has been uploaded.
Neologism
I learned a new word just now: ‘backronym.’ This refers to a situation where you take an existing acronym and create a new description based upon it. The excellent web comic PhD could be considered an example.
Somehow, this all arose from re-watching Oh Brother, Where Art Thou: definitely one of the better films of the last decade.
Document metadata
It remains somewhat amazing to me that governments and major international institutions so frequently forget what it means to distribute documents in Word format. In particular, people are surprisingly ignorant of how Word tracks changes: making documents into a palimpsest of revisions, not all of which you want the outside world to see. You don’t want the comment about how pointless one of the ‘key items’ in your ‘corporate vision’ is making it into the file that gets passed to the New York Times. Even the early copy of the Summary for Policymakers of the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC that I have includes a few notes about edits that still need to be done.
Hopefully, closed standards like Word documents will fall by the wayside during the next decade or so. It is insane to be distributing so much information in a proprietary format for no good reason (just one more manifestation of monopolistic dominance). Hopefully, whichever open document format eventually comes to be standard will have better means for assessing and controlling what information you are inadvertantly embedding in your press releases, reports, spreadsheets, etc. Until then, lax security is likely to keep offering some interesting glances into the drafting processes of such publicized documents.
PS. One other thing to remember is that the standard jpg images produced by Adobe Photoshop include thumbnail files that are not edited when you change the image. As such, a face blurred out of the large version may still be recognizable in the embedded thumbnail version. The same goes for areas that may have been cropped from the image entirely. I am sure Cat Schwartz isn’t the only person who has suffered public embarassment because of this. No doubt, many other pieces of software include such counter intuitive and potentially problematic behaviours.
Fish paper published
After two years of being reworked, assessed, shortened, updated, and assessed again, the eternal fish paper has been published. They didn’t print my acknowledgments, so I shall list them here:
Many thanks to Dr. Ian Townsend-Gault, who has helped a great deal throughout the entire process. In particular, his assistance with the international legal components of the paper is much appreciated. I also want to thank Dr. Daniel Pauly, Dr. Jacqueline Alder, and Dr. Rashid Sumaila of the UBC Fisheries Centre and Sea Around Us Project. They are the ones who helped me find and understand much of the scientific material that supports the paper. Finally, I want to thank the editors of the MIT International Review for their comments, as well as for formatting the final version so nicely. The efforts of Solomon Hsiang are particularly appreciated.
Anyone who wants the version with more than 100 footnotes should email me. Like Foreign Affairs, this journal has a policy of not including them.
Lazy science reporting
People may have noticed that the news today is saturated with stories about scientists ‘discovering Kryptonite:’ the fictional substance that causes Superman to lose his powers. The claim is based on how the chemical formula for the new mineral – discovered in Siberia – is the same as the one invented for Kryptonite in the film Superman Returns. Obviously, this is just a fluke that arose because of some words a scriptwriter or prop designer happened to string together. No insight arises from referring to the new mineral with reference to the film. To me, this seems like the same kind of cheap, low-brow science reporting as when all the coverage about ‘hobbits’ being discovered emerged in response to the discovery of H. floresiensis.
I can understand why a journalist might want to put out a fluff piece like these and then take the weekend off, but it really isn’t ‘science’ reporting in any meaningful sense. It is especially depressing when quality newspapers decide to print such rubbish, perhaps hoping to attract a few more readers. It is astonishing to me that they lack allure on their own, when discussing serious science. After all, the pace of ongoing discovery and technological development is staggering, and it has never been more important for ordinary citizens to understand the natural and man-made phenomena that influence the ways in which we live.
PS. Claire, Hilary, and I saw many goats today. Here are some goats eating plants.
Off in Devon (8/8)
At some point today, we will be making the three hour drive back to Oxford. Please give me a bit of a window of time in which to respond to the messages that have piled up since I left.
Pondering remedy design
Sorry to be so uninteresting of late. While waiting for me to hammer my thesis together, why not read some fine web comics:
These have all been mentioned here before, but may prove novel to those who haven’t been paying very close attention. Feel free to suggest more to one another.
For random thesis mutterings, follow this link:
Planning to vanish in a week
Please note: I will be in Branscombe, Devon working on my thesis between the 31st of March and the 7th of April, as previously noted. During this period, I will have limited internet connectivity at best. Upon my return, I will have sixteen days left to finish my thesis, so don’t expect to hear enormously much from me during this period.
Oh, and I will be leaving for Paris sometime soon after the submission of my thesis on April 23rd…
[Update: 11:30pm] I have just learned that there will be… no Internet access at all. I am told that: “There may be some internet cafes in Sidmouth, a walkable 6 miles away.” Gasp! Sputter! That is almost reason enough to just stay and work in Oxford.
[Update: 26 March 2007] For some reason, whenever I go on vacation my reader numbers plummet. This happens when I leave pre-written posts set to appear at timed intervals. It seems to happen even when I blog from internet cafes while on vacation. Should I simply not bother, leaving a pause in this long-advancing progression of text?