Thoughts from the Physics Chick

Tribond Tuesday

2012-01-24T12:07:00.000-05:00

St. George, Utah
Nashville, Illinois
Machias, Maine

Tribond Tuesday

2012-01-17T11:12:00.000-05:00

Harrison Ford in 1982
Tom Cruise in 2002
Matt Damon in 2011

Tribond Tuesday

2012-01-10T11:06:00.003-05:00

Illinois State Normal University (now called Illinois State University)
Pennsylvania State University (University Park Campus)
Texas A&M University

Tribond Tuesday

2012-01-03T11:10:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth Taylor
Melanie Griffith
Marie Osmond

Tribond Tuesday

2011-12-27T11:48:00.000-05:00

New Year's Day
Ash Wednesday
All Saint's Day

Tribond Tuesday

2011-12-20T23:28:00.000-05:00

kings
ships
French hens

Tribond Goes on Vacation

2011-12-13T11:10:00.000-05:00

Tribond Tuesday will be on vacation until Christmas, since I'm going out of town.

Tribond Tuesday

2011-12-06T11:04:00.000-05:00

calculator
triangle
wager

Tribond Tuesday

2011-11-29T11:40:00.000-05:00

Evita
Sunday in the Park with George
The Secret Garden

Tribond Tuesday

2011-11-22T11:57:00.002-05:00

This one will almost certainly require research to figure it out, but it's so specific that I can't resist posting it.

Jennifer Garner in Alias
Natasha Henstridge in Eli Stone
Paolo Montalban in Cinderella (1997 TV movie)

Tribond Tuesday

2011-11-15T12:46:00.000-05:00

apple
mountain
film

Tribond Tuesday

2011-11-08T12:09:00.000-05:00

Carolina
Georgia
Virginia

Tribond Tuesday

2011-11-01T12:50:00.000-04:00

Marc Brown
Beatrix Potter
Rosemary Wells

Tribond Tuesday

2011-10-25T12:02:00.000-04:00

Saint Christopher
Saint Lucy of Syracuse
Saint Vincent of Saragossa

Tribond Tuesday

2011-10-18T13:12:00.000-04:00

Come, Come Ye Saints
The Day Dawn Is Breaking
The Iron Rod

Tribond Tuesday (Steve Jobs memorial edition)

2011-10-11T16:24:00.001-04:00

Michael Landon
René Magritte
Patrick Swayze

Tribond Tuesday

2011-10-04T13:12:00.000-04:00

harp
piano
organ

Tribond Tuesday

2011-09-27T13:41:00.000-04:00

Colin Firth in 2010
Helen Mirren in 2006
Judi Dench in 1998

Tribond Tuesday: Tribond FAIL

2011-09-20T12:34:00.001-04:00

Sometimes I come up with 2/3 of a really good tribond, but I can't seem to find a good third entry. A while ago, I noticed that Rhode Island is the smallest US state and Prince Edward Island is the smallest Canadian province, but I was never able to find another satisfactory X Island that was the smallest of its class. (Ideally X Island would be a political division of some sort roughly equivalent to a state or province, otherwise I could just pick the smallest island of any number of archipelagos.)

Tribond Tuesday

2011-09-13T12:15:00.000-04:00

Iowa City, Iowa
Landover Hills, Maryland
Montpelier, Vermont

Tribond Tuesday

2011-09-06T14:18:00.000-04:00

gill
mutchkin
chopin

Tribond Tuesday (Irene edition)

2011-08-30T13:59:00.000-04:00

hurricanes
needles
potatoes

Tribond Tuesday

2011-08-23T13:48:00.002-04:00

“Who said we were terrorists?”

“By Grabthar's Hammer . . . what a savings.”

“There will be no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations in this class.”

Superhero Metrics, Part IV: Applications

2011-07-21T21:48:00.002-04:00

There are times when you want to work with a binary category—one that defines items as either in the category or out, with no gradations—but there are times that you want to be able to be able to rank items in a category by popularity, prototypicality, etc.

Want to try out a new author? Start with their most popular work. (If you don’t like that, then you probably won’t like their work, in general.) Can’t remember why an actor’s face looks so familiar? Go to imdb and sort their filmography by votes. (Their most popular works—which you’re more likely to have seen—will sort to the top.) Want to become more knowledgeable about opera or any other topic? Start by learning about the most popular stuff so that you have a foundation in the subject.

(I admit, I’m having some trouble writing this section, because wanting to be able to sort items in a category by popularity or some other metric is second nature to me. However, others may have entirely different information needs and searching habits.)

In my last post, I'll write a summary and conclusion.

Superhero Metrics, Part IV: Disadvantages

2011-07-12T18:49:00.002-04:00

The WIMCS is not without its own biases and shortcomings. One of the biggest flaws I can see is that it measures only current popularity, without regard to historical popularity or influence.

For example, I’d guess that Iron Man only comes in at such a high ranking because of the success of the 2008 and 2010 films. (Indeed, the page for the 2008 film has a slightly higher WIMCS ranking than the page for Iron Man, himself, suggesting that the film is driving interest in the character, rather than the other way around.)

In the case of Iron Man, specifically, the films were released after Wikipedia came into existence, which means that we can look back in time at the page history to see how the release of the films affected its WIMCS ranking.

However, in the case of such cultural touchstones as Superman, the institutional memory of Wikipedia is far too short to remember a time when Superman was the biggest superhero by far, instead of tied for second with Spider-Man. (Still, if you’ve got an article about you in the Old English Wikipedia, there has to be a sense in which you’ve culturally “arrived.”*)

Another big flaw in this methodology is testability. The WIMCS was developed as a more precise alternative to keyword searches, but in order to verify its accuracy, it needs to be checked against some other metric, which brings us back to keyword searches or some other technique.

For the moment, the only metric I’ve tested it against is my own gut reaction. So, if Bizarro had a higher WIMCS ranking than Superman, I’d know the methodology was flawed, because I know that Superman is more culturally significant that Bizarro. However, if Superman had been slightly ahead of or behind Spider-Man, I don’t think that I would have been surprised. (Indeed WIMCS rankings may not be fine-tuned enough for it to matter if one article ranks slightly ahead of or behind another one, although I still believe that large differences in rankings should be considered significant.)

Yet another disadvantage is that this technique can measure a topic’s overall popularity, but not its popularity within a certain class. So, Beethoven and Bizet are both members of the class “Opera composers,” and Beethoven’s WIMCS rating is 2.5 times that of Bizet’s, so Beethoven is the more popular opera composer, right? Well, no. Although Beethoven did write one opera (Fidelio), he’s much better known for his musical compositions in other forms, while Bizet’s Carmen is a staple of opera companies. (And, indeed, the WIMCS ratings for Fidelio and Carmen bear out this distinction.)

And the last disadvantage is fairly straightforward: This technique doesn’t work for topics that don’t have their own Wikipedia page.

In part V, I’ll discuss potential applications for this ranking technique.

Superhero Metrics, Part III: Advantages

2011-07-04T13:01:00.003-04:00

One of the biggest advantages of this methodology is precision of meaning, which is the main disadvantage of keyword searches. So, Wikipedia neatly separates out the pages for “wolverine,” the animal (46 links); Wolverine, the X-Man (37 links); and the Wolverines who are the mascot of Utah Valley University (1 link, to page in Farsi, of all languages).

Another advantage is that the initial connections between wikis are made by humans, which prevents two words that look the same but have different meanings from being matched up.

Third, even though the Wikipedias of the world are freely editable, these results would be fairly difficult to fake, because you’d have to be able to write about a subject in many different languages.

Lastly, you can use this methodology to get results for any topic that has an entry in the English Wikipedia (although it will obviously be less useful for more obscure topics).

However, there are also a number of disadvantages to this methodology, which I'll cover in Part IV.

Superhero Metrics, Part II: A New Approach

2011-06-27T12:01:00.001-04:00

Permit me, then, to introduce to you the Wikipedia Inter-language Metric of Cultural Significance (WIMCS)*.

The premise behind the WIMCS is simple: If a person, place, thing, etc., is highly culturally significant, it will not only appear in the English Language Wikipedia (which is the largest Wikipedia, by far), it will also appear in the Wikipedias of many other languages.

So, in order to calculate the WIMCS for a given entity, go to its Wikipedia page, open the “Languages” menu on the left side of the page, and simply count the number of languages listed.

Here’s some WIMCS data from the previously mentioned topic of conversation:

61 – Batman
57 – Spider-Man, Superman
37 – Wolverine
36 – X-Men
31 - The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Iron Man
28 - Captain America
25 – The Joker
24 – Lex Luthor
23 - Flash, Wonder Woman
22 – Green Lantern
19 - Aquaman
18 - Jean Grey, Robin, Thor
17 – Hellboy, Professor X
9 - Hawkman

This data confirms that Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man are the top three superheroes (as expected), and suggests that Wolverine comes in at number four (at least, of the superheroes I’ve thought to check), which seems plausible.

In part III, I'll examine some of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach.

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*I’m not married to this name or to the acronym representing it. Other, catchier suggestions are highly welcome.

Superhero Metrics, Part I: The Problem

2011-06-20T12:07:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, I was talking to my brother about superheroes and other comic book characters, specifically, ranking them by popularity or cultural prominence. (Why? What do you talk to your little brother about?*)

We agreed that Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man were probably the top three, but we didn’t know who would come next.

Because I am an information scientist and this type of information problem is right up my alley, I kept thinking about this for a couple of days after the conversation.

The most straightforward approach would be to do a simple Google keyword search and count the number of hits. This works reasonably well if the words being searched don’t have prominent alternate meanings. (Most of the hits for “Batman,” for instance, are probably referring to the Dark Knight, and not the province in Turkey.)

However, this type of metric completely falls apart when you start trying to search for comics characters with names like “Wolverine” or “Cyclops.” (You could add limiting terms to the search, such as “Wolverine X-Men” or “Cyclops X-Men,” but then the results for those searches aren’t comparable to bare searches for “Batman” or “Superman.”†)

Having ruled out a keyword search as insufficiently precise, my thoughts turned to Wikipedia, one of my favorite resources.

The most obvious way to use Wikipedia to gauge cultural prominence would be to compare the lengths of the articles about different characters. For instance, the article about Professor X is about 11,000 words long, but the article about Xorn (a more recent addition to the X-Men franchise) is only about 3,000 words long.

I think this approach would work fairly well for differentiating between minor and major cultural icons. However, Wikipedia guidelines state that articles longer than around 10,000 words should be broken into multiple articles, which makes word count unsuitable for ranking the top cultural figures, because article length will eventually plateau.

However, while I was playing around with Wikipedia articles, I did think of another way of using them to gauge popularity, which I’ll introduce in Part 2.

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* Actually, if you’re Humble Master, this is probably exactly what you talk to your little brother about.

† If pressed to use a keyword search approach, I might compare the search terms “Wolverine comics,” “Cyclops comics,” “Batman comics,” etc. Adding the term “comics” would effectively clear up any ambiguity, but it would also eliminate results that talk about the characters in other media. (Part of the reason that some of these characters are so culturally prominent is that they’ve moved beyond the comics realm to film, television, fiction, etc.)

Christmas 2010

2010-12-28T20:56:00.002-05:00

I think this Christmas will be remembered as the year that

- My grandfather had emergency open heart surgery. (He's doing well, thanks.)
- The Provo Tabernacle burned down. (That building is not doing so well, alas.)
- My mother lost her voice for a few days and my brother and I mercilessly teased her by saying inflammatory things she couldn't respond to or wishing aloud that someone would give us a lecture on her favorite topics.

Merry Christmas, all!

Tribond Whenever

2010-11-12T08:42:00.000-05:00

North by Northwest
Star Trek VI
What Dreams may Come

Emma vs. Emma

2010-08-16T20:45:00.003-04:00

I recently had the chance to see the 1996 BBC version of Emma, starring Kate Beckinsale. I’ve seen the Gwyneth Paltrow version multiple times and I’m always interested in variations on a theme, so I thought it would be fun to compare the two. Since the Paltrow version is better known, I was surprised that I preferred the Beckinsale version in most areas. Here’s a rundown:

Harriet Smith

Toni Collette can do no wrong in my eyes, so it’s difficult to judge the two films without being overly biased towards her. However, I think that she does a better job of putting humor into the character of Harriet Smith, so I’m going to give the advantage to Paltrow, in this instance.

Mr. and Mrs. Elton

I’d say it’s a tossup between the two versions. I love Juliet Stevenson as an actress, but I like the actress in the Beckinsale version, as well. The Beckinsale version portrays the Eltons as fairly happy in their marriage, while the Paltrow version portrays Mr. Elton as being pretty much entirely submissive to Mrs. Elton. I suppose that Mr. Elton deserves to be miserable, but I didn’t really mind the Beckinsale portrayal, either. One thing that struck me was Mrs. Elton’s accent in the Beckinsale version. It was very odd and sounded almost American. I wish I knew more about British accents so I could actually place it, because I doubt that the BBC went out of their way to cast an American who couldn’t do a convincing British accent. Advantage: Neither.

Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill

I’m a fan of Polly Walker, but the Beckinsale version does a much better job of highlighting Jane Fairfax’s plight: She is an orphan, raised by another family (friends of her father) as a companion to their daughter, but the daughter is now grown and married, so Jane must make her way in the world as a governess, which basically means she has to leave behind everything and everyone she’s ever known, because working as a governess is a huge step down in society. (Except that wasn’t Miss Taylor / Mrs. Weston a governess? She seems to have turned out all right.) Anyway, the Beckinsale version really focuses on Jane Fairfax’s dire straits, whereas the Paltrow version glosses over her situation and makes it seem as if Jane’s biggest problem is that she has to put up with Mrs. Elton’s wanting to “adopt” her as a project. Advantage: Beckinsale.

Ewan McGregor is a great casting choice for this role, but he doesn’t have a lot to work with. In the Beckinsale version, there is a bigger focus on how duplicitous and self-centered Frank Churchill’s behavior really is. (This also works well with the bigger focus on Jane Fairfax’s situation, since it highlights how much Frank is playing with her emotions, as much as with anyone else’s.) He shows a different face to everyone and toys with others’ emotions just so that he can get what he wants. What he wants is to be free to marry Jane Fairfax, which isn’t a bad thing, but his methods are reprehensible. Jane Austen almost always includes this sort of “charming but evil” character in her novels (think George Wickham, William Elliot, or John Willoughby) and Frank Churchill is probably the best of this bunch, but he’s still not a good man. Advantage: Beckinsale.

Mr. Knightley

Mark Strong doesn’t often play leading men. He doesn’t quite have the Hollywood good looks for it, so he’s more often cast as villains. However, I think his “Hollywood homely” (i.e., only unattractive by Hollywood standards) looks actually work well for this role. In the Beckinsale version, Mr. Knightley is portrayed as someone who is all good character and almost no polish. He walks around Highbury and his estate instead of going by carriage, he gives all his eggs to the poor and is left with none for his own breakfast, and he speaks his mind with no regard for maintaining a polite social façade. This puts him sharply in contrast with Frank Churchill, who is all façade. Frank is charismatic enough to charm almost everyone he meets, while Mr. Knightley’s good qualities can be overlooked by people who are only interested in the superficial. Plus, Mrs. Elton’s comment about being surprised that Mr. Knightley is so gentlemanly makes more sense if he’s portrayed as actually being a little rough around the edges.

Jeremy Northam is very attractive and his Mr. Knightley is equally so, but his Mr. Knightley seems like a Beautiful Person™ who is destined to marry an equally Beautiful Person™, instead of a good man who would only be appreciated by a good woman. Advantage: Beckinsale.

Emma Woodhouse

As a person, Emma is only bearable if she comes off as simply very young. She has a great amount of power because of her position in society, and the whole story of Emma is about her learning not to abuse that power. Kate Beckinsale does a great job of portraying Emma as young and excited and impulsive, but not malicious. (The dream sequences are also a great way of visually portraying Emma’s imagination getting carried away.)

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Emma, on the other hand, seems self-centered and duplicitous, like someone who should know better than to behave so badly, but can’t be bothered to care about anyone but herself. Advantage: Beckinsale.

So, although I like many of the actors in the Paltrow version, I vastly prefer the writing and direction in the latter. (Plus, I prefer the two leading actors in the Beckinsale version, which makes a big difference.)

Of course, the biggest problem with Emma is the relationship between Emma and Mr. Knightley. Emma has a significant growth arc over the course of the story: She starts out young, meddlesome, and self-absorbed and she learns that social position is not the same as maturity and wisdom. Mr. Knightley, on the other hand, begins the story by being mature and wise and right about everything all the time, and ends it pretty much the same way. The upshot of this is that we understand what Emma sees in him—he’s the voice of reason who steadies her when she’s being too impulsive—but we have no idea what Mr. Knightley sees in her. He doesn’t appear to have any equivalent faults in his character for her to shore up and there is no evidence that he particularly wants to be around someone like her. In short, he doesn’t seem to have an “Emma-shaped hole” in his life.

Her main attractions, then, are that she is (1) pretty and (2) finally old enough to be suitable wife material. I suppose Mr. Knightley could also be attracted by the idea of having someone around to correct and be superior to all the time, but that hardly seems like a recipe for an equal marriage. (Incidentally, the relationship between Marianne Dashwood and Colonel Brandon suffers from the same fundamental inequality.)

Compare that with Mr. Darcy telling Elizabeth Bennet: “By you I was properly humbled.” Like Emma, Elizabeth has to learn to look past surface charm to see the true worth of a man, but, unlike Emma, she clearly offers something back, in the form of taking the overly proud Mr. Darcy down a peg or two. (It’s my opinion that the strength of this relationship is a big factor in making Pride and Prejudice the most popular Jane Austen novel.)

So, I liked the Paltrow Emma when it came out, and I liked the Beckinsale Emma when I finally got around to seeing it, but, oddly enough, seeing both in quick succession has left me deeply unsatisfied with the basic premise of the story.

Cat. & Reference: Me, Myself, and I

2010-08-03T21:34:00.003-04:00

This morning I was fixing up the record for a play called "Jesse and Grace: A Best Friends Story." According to the title page, the play was written by "Sandra Fenichel Asher, based on the poetry of Sandy Asher and David L. Harrison."

Only the first named person was listed in the record I was working on, so I needed to add the last two names to the record. I was also curious to figure out how "Sandy Asher" was related to "Sandra Fenichel Asher." (Maybe a mother and daughter, given the similarity of names?)

I did an authority file search on "Sandy Asher" only to discover that . . . they're the same person. (If you search "Sandra Fenichel Asher," you get a cross reference to "Sandy Asher" as the authorized form of the name.)

Just to be clear, it's not at all unusual for the authorized form of a name to be different from the form that appears on the title page. And it's not unheard of for a person to be listed more than once on a title page if they contributed to the creation of a work in multiple different ways. What is weird is for someone to show up in a statement of responsibility under two different forms of their name. It would be like saying a book was written by Robert Fahrvehrgnügen and illustrated by Bobby Fahrvergnügen. That's just weird.

In which the Grand Hypothesis is revealed

2010-06-26T13:27:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago on By Common Consent, there was a post about what's wrong with music in LDS worship services. There was a lot of talk in the comments thread about trouble with organists, in particular, which got me to wondering . . . are we running out of organists?

The thing about LDS organists is that they’re hard to grow. First, you have to grow a pianist. (You don’t technically have to learn piano first, but playing the piano develops finger strength in a way that playing the organ doesn’t. It's like the difference between typing on a typewriter and typing on a computer keyboard.)

And once you’ve grown a competent pianist, they have to unlearn a lot of piano technique in order to learn proper organ technique, plus learn to play the pedals. (Add to that the phenomenon of LDS pianists who don’t really want to be organists, but get called to serve in that capacity anyway and so aren’t very motivated to learn to do it well.) And the capping injustice is that anyone who’s motivated enough to learn to play the organ at a professional level will probably end up working on Sundays at some other denomination (LDS organists aren’t paid), which pulls some of the best LDS organists out of the pool of people who can play during Sacrament Meeting.

The upshot is that it takes a long time to grow an organist from scratch—I’d guess an average of ten years or so—and no one is going to call someone to be an organist ten years in advance, so we rely on being able to call people who are already well into the process of learning to be an organist.

But what if that pool was shrinking? What if fewer people were learning to play the piano (or any musical instrument) in favor of other pursuits? We could be facing a massive shortage of organists for simple demographic reasons, with dire implications.

So, my survey was designed to test whether fewer Mormons (or Americans, in general) are taking music lessons now than in years past. And my stunning results are . . . that I have a serious sampling problem. 80% of my responses were from people born in the same decade, which makes it difficult to do a chronological comparison by decade. Given enough data, I could work with that kind of skew, but the bigger problem is that every single person who responded said they’d had formal music instruction, which I know isn’t true of all Americans or Mormons, as a whole. (This is either a case of birds of a feather flocking together, or my not making it clear that responses from people who hadn’t had any musical training were also welcome.)

Anyway, I’ll have to find another way to gather data for my hypothesis if I want to test it, but it was still interesting to see the survey results.

A poll

2010-06-06T20:05:00.006-04:00

I have a hypothesis and I need your help in collecting some data.

1. What year were you born?

2. Are you LDS (or were you raised LDS)?

3. How many years of formal music instruction have you had? (By “formal music instruction,” I have in mind private music lessons or music classes at school.)

4. Which instruments have you formally studied?
a. Piano only
b. One or more instruments besides piano (including other keyboard instruments)
c. Piano, plus one or more other instruments

If anything is unclear, please ask. (I’m hoping to refine my questions here and then set up a more formal survey.) I’ve turned off Blogger authorization for this post, so you should be able to post anonymously, if you so choose.

Tribond Tuesday

2010-05-18T16:58:00.000-04:00

The Dark Knight
Early Edition
The Fugitive

Warning signs

2010-05-14T15:42:00.001-04:00

Background: One of my minor job responsibilities is to look over the weekly lists of newly-approved Library of Congress subject headings to note any headings which are of special interest to our library.

The Event: Today, I was looking at a list of terms approved in March, when I came across the subject "Divided-power rings."

My Immediate Reaction: Like the Green Lantern?

The Actual Meaning: Something to do with commutative algebra.

Conclusion: I may be overdosing on comics, lately.

Tribond Tuesday

2010-04-27T17:43:00.000-04:00

drummers
eggs
apostles

Of maidens and matrons

2010-04-23T20:09:00.002-04:00

Oddly enough, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether I want to keep my maiden name. I say “oddly,” because I don’t have any current prospects for doing anything else, so I’m not exactly sure where this unexpected concern is coming from. (Well, aside from my general proclivity for worrying about things that aren’t a current issue and possibly never will be.)

Anyway, if I had to put my finger on it, I’d say that it’s been on my mind for a few reasons. One reason is that a friend of mine recently got married and has been torn about whether to keep her maiden name. Another reason is that I turned 30 last year, so I feel like I’ve had this name for a while, now, and I’m not going to go trading it in without a good reason. The last reason, silly as it may seem, has to do with authority control and the fact that publishing under two different names (or even different forms of a name) is a bad idea. (This last one isn’t really a big deal, though, because you don’t have to publish under your legal name, so if I write an article now and then write another article after I legally change my name, I’d probably still publish the second one under my maiden name, regardless.)

The weird thing is, if I married a guy named John Smith*, for example, I don’t think I’d mind at all being called [Katya] Smith or Mrs. Smith or Sister Smith. I’ve acquired enough nicknames over the years that I don’t really care what people call me in terms of everyday encounters, but I want to know I’m still the same person, deep down, and apparently my current last name is a big part of my identity.
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*I was going to go with “John Doe,” but then I realized that I associate that with dead people, thanks to watching too many police procedurals. So I’m opting for being Pocahontas, instead.

Tribond Tuesday

2010-04-20T16:34:00.000-04:00

Conjunctivitis
An overnight flight
A preorbital hematoma

ST:TNG: The Borg

2010-04-15T19:25:00.005-04:00

By special request, we interrupt our leisurely description of the crew of the NCC 1701-D (or Enterprise-D) to instead skip ahead and explain the Borg.

In the second season of TNG (the episode “Q Who?,” to be precise), Captain Picard boasts to an omnipotent being named Q that his crew is ready to face whatever challenges await them in exploring the galaxy. This annoys Q, so he transports the ship to a distant, uncharted region of space where the crew meets an alien race known as the Borg.

The Borg are cyborgs with pale skin and black or gray cybernetic appendages which they use as specialized tools that give them abilities beyond their organic bodies. They have a hive mind, so they don’t care about individuality or diplomacy; all they want is to assimilate any humanoid life form they come across. (Pretty much all they ever say is “We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” And they all chant it in unison.)

An isolated Borg is stronger and smarter than an individual human, because of their cyborg implants. As a hive, the Borg can harness their group intelligence to make decisions instantly and easily outmaneuver their opponents. Basically, the crew of the Enterprise is completely outmatched.

Near the end of the episode, Picard admits to Q that he was wrong and his crew is no match for these alien creatures. Q reappears and graciously moves the Enterprise back to where they originally were, although not before a number of (minor) crew members lose their lives in the Borg attack, plus the Borg have now been made aware of the existence of the Federation, so it is assumed that they will be actively searching for them so they can be assimilated.

The next time the Borg appear is in a 2-part cliffhanger episode in at the end of season 3 / beginning of season 4 of TNG. This time, they kidnap Captain Picard and turn him into a Borg so that he can be a sort of intermediary between the Borg and the Federation. (He got better.) While he was a Borg, he was called Locutus, because the Borg apparently have a thing for quasi-Latinified names (Jean-Luc -> Locutus).

The Borg reappear many more times in the Star Trek franchise, in both TV episodes and movies, but I think this is all the background needed to understand what’s currently going on with the 100 Hour Board.

ST:TNG: The Crew (part 1)

2010-04-14T18:02:00.000-04:00

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Captain Picard is almost diametrically opposed in personality from Captain Kirk. Where Kirk is an impulsive lover and fighter, Picard is a cultured philosopher.

Picard's responsibilities as captain are also markedly different from Kirk's because the writers decided that it was actually pretty stupid for the captain of the ship to be regularly endangering himself by always leading away teams on potentially hostile planets, so by the time TNG takes place, it's Star Fleet policy for the ship's first officer to lead away teams, while the captain stays behind on the ship. (Now I wonder which came first: The desire to have a more philosophical captain, with the change in Star Fleet policy as justification or the reasonable update in Star Fleet policy, which in turn led the writers to make the captain more philosophical?)

As his name would suggest, Captain Picard is supposed to be of French ancestry. However, the producers ended up casting English actor Patrick Stewart (and veteran of the Royal Shakespearean Company) in the role and the writers didn't really do much to make him seem French. (I think he said "merde," occasionally, and there were references to his family owning a vineyard, and maybe his brother had a French accent?)

Commander William T. Riker

Commander Riker is the first officer of the Enterprise. As such, he has inherited Captain Kirk's job of leading away teams, as well as a lot of Kirk's "girl in every port" personality. (However, having captain Kirk fall in love with you is often a death sentence, whereas Riker's affections seem to be less lethal.)

Anyway, Riker was intended to be the main (male) sex symbol of the show, but it turned out that the female viewership actually preferred Picard. (Let's see, a powerful Star Fleet captain who's also a cultured gentleman vs. an impulsive pretty boy who never seems to live up to his supposedly impressive reputation? No contest.*)

Lieutenant Commander Data

Every incarnation of Star Trek has one regular crew member who's really different from everyone else. The original series included crew members who were black, white, Asian, Russian, American, Scottish and . . . Vulcan. Star Trek: The Next Generation included crew members who were human, Klingon, (half) Beta-Zoid and . . . android.

Data is the creation of the brilliant cyberneticist Noonien Soong. He's not a mass-produced model; on the contrary, he's the only one of his kind (or almost). He is mathematically brilliant, but he lacks emotion and consequently has trouble understanding human nature.

As a character, Data is useful because he can drive the plot of an episode in a number of different ways. On a good day, he can provide comic relief as he tries to grasp social subtleties. On a bad day, his malfunctioning "positronic net" (= android brain) can provide a story conflict. (I wouldn't call Data a loose cannon, by any stretch, but there are a surprising number of plots that are driven by something going wrong with him. Or the holodeck. And then there's that episode where something goes wrong with both Data and the holodeck. Good times.) And on a really bad day, he can single-handedly save everyone with his special android powers.

Stay tuned for our next installment, where we discuss three more members of the crew (probably Troi, Worf, and Crusher).
_________________________
*This is, incidentally, also the problem with the film First Knight. I don't know any woman who would pick Richard Gere's Lancelot over Sean Connery's Arthur.

Tribond Tuesday

2010-04-06T16:56:00.001-04:00

Geoffrey Chaucer
Charles Darwin
William Lamb (Lord Melbourne)

Cat. & Reference: Will the real C. H. Smith please stand up?

2010-04-05T17:34:00.002-04:00

One of the things I have to do when I'm cataloging something new is check to see if the author's name appears on a big list of names maintained by the Library of Congress.*

For instance, the other day I came across a little pamphlet about the 1st Maine Cavalry written in 1885 by someone named C.H. Smith, which meant that I needed to try and find said Smith in said Big List of Names.† The difficulty with this is that names in the Big List can be in a different form from how they're found "in the wild," so to speak. I'd probably find Mr. Smith listed under his full first name or first and middle name, but I didn't know what those are, and "Smith" doesn't exactly narrow it down.

However, I did have a couple of pieces of information to help me on my quest: I knew that Mr. Smith was still alive in 1885 when he wrote down his recollections, and I knew that he was probably born no later than 1845, or he wouldn't have been old enough to fight in the Civil War. Names on the Big List (of Names) often include birth and death dates, so these two dates would help me track down the elusive Mr. Smith.

The first thing I did was check out all of the people entered in the Big List as "Smith, C. H." (My Mr. Smith was probably entered under a longer version of his name, but it was a place to start.)

There were seven people named "Smith, C. H." (or some variation of it) in the Big List. Five were too young, and the other two didn't seem to have any connection to the Civil War or Maine. (One had been an engraver in New York and the other one had been a publisher in Boston.)

Since I'd had no luck with people entered as "C. H. Smith," I decided to see if I could find out more about the 1st Maine Cavalry.

Googling "1st Maine Cavalry" led me to the Wikipedia page about the regiment. It didn't include any names of regiment members in the article, but it did include a link at the bottom to a website for a 1st Maine Cavalry reenactment organization. (Say what you will about the quality of Wikipedia articles, I generally find the "External Links" quite useful.)

When I got to the website of the reenactment organization, I clicked on the "history" link and was rewarded with the information that one Colonel Charles H. Smith had been awarded a Medal of Honor in 1895. Happy with this small victory, I returned to the Big Lists of Names.

This time there were over 40 matches for "Smith, Charles H." but I ruled most of them out pretty easily until I got to number 33, "Smith, Charles Henry, 1827-1902." According to his record, he was born in Hollis, Maine, which looked promising, but I wanted more confirmation before declaring him a match. His record said he was also the subject of the book "Horse Soldiers in Blue," so I looked that book up on WorldCat to see if I could learn more about it. Sure enough, when I found the book, it turned out to be about the 1st Maine Cavalry. Success!

_______________
*It's called "authority control" and there's more to it than this, but I'm assuming most of you don't really want a lecture on the topic.

†There is, of course, a more technical name for what I'm calling the Big List of Names, but apparently I'm trying to dumb things down for you all, today. Or maybe I think that avoiding technical jargon will help me connect better with the youth. (Those crazy kids, with their FaceSpace. Do they still like rap music?)

Tribond Tuesday

2010-03-30T19:30:00.001-04:00

Frederic from The Pirates of Penzance
Cartoonist Howard Tayler
Antonio Sabàto, Jr.

Mild-mannered superheroes

2010-03-17T18:59:00.000-04:00

I've been on a real superhero kick lately. In the last six weeks I've watched The Dark Knight, The Incredibles, episodes from Lois & Clark, and I've read Watchmen.

Of course "superhero story" is about all that these four have in common. In terms of format, one is a graphic novel / comic book, one is a television show, one is a live-action film, and one is an animated film. They also have little in common in terms of tone, from The Incredibles, which is a family-friendly comedy (albeit with some serious moments) to Watchmen, a dystopian murder mystery, with Lois & Clark and The Dark Knight falling somewhere in the middle.

But they all fit the broad definition of a superhero story, which has given me a chance to examine what I love about these stories.

It turns out that I think secret identities are very important in a superhero story. (It's probably why I've never really gotten into the X-men. No mild-mannered alter ego? No thanks!)

But what I really love is not just the existence of a secret identity, but the interplay between the dual lives, especially the times that each life bleeds into the other.

For example, my favorite scenes in The Dark Knight are when Bruce Wayne takes out one of the Joker's thugs who thinks he's just a "pretty boy," and later, when he crashes his Lamborghini to protect Coleman Reese, the Wayne Enterprises employee who's been targeted by the Joker for trying to reveal Batman's secret identity. (Jim Gordon foreshadows the second event when he sarcastically says "Maybe Batman will protect you," which, of course, Batman does but nobody realizes it was him. And then Bruce catches Coleman's eye and gives him the slightest of nods and Coleman, who was in a panic after the Joker puts a price on his head, looks even more terrified to have been rescued.)

In The Incredibles, it's the family dinner argument that forces everyone to use their powers (and then suddenly stop when they're startled by a knock at the door), plus Bob often doesn't know his own strength, so a tough day at work leads him to crush a doorknob, dent the frame of his car, close the car door so hard the window shatters, and accidentally throw his boss through about six cubicle walls.

In Lois & Clark, Clark often uses his powers on the sly or forgets that he's not supposed to have them. E.g.:

Lois: Do you want to borrow my binoculars?
Clark: I don't need them.
Lois: [gives him a quizzical look]
Clark: I mean—it's hard to use binoculars with glasses.

Clark's life intrudes on Superman, as well, because Superman constantly has to think of excuses for where Clark has just disappeared to and pretend that Clark has filled him in on things he wouldn't otherwise know about.

There wasn't a lot of this in Watchmen—I can't think of anything besides Daniel and Laurie beating up a bunch of muggers. (With such a large cast of characters, it's hard to focus much on the daily life of any one of them. Plus, most of them have given up their superhero lifestyle when the story starts. I guess maybe you could count Adrian fighting off his would-be assassin, but Adrian's also given up his secret identity, so I'm not sure it counts.)

I'm not sure why the interplay between identities is so important to me. (I mean, it seems like an awful lot of work to create a character with separate identities if all I then want is to see those identities come together again in some way.) Perhaps it has something to do with the idea of seeing past a superficial exterior to recognize the depths of the person underneath.

Tribond Tuesday

2010-03-16T16:33:00.001-04:00

Play it again, Sam.
Beam me up, Scotty.
Luke, I am your father.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

2010-03-09T19:15:00.000-05:00

The other day, I remembered that I hadn't posted one of these in a while. (And then I went back over my blog history and discovered that it's been almost a year, so this is long overdue.)

The original Star Trek series was canceled after just three seasons, but later gained a huge following after the Star Trek movies were made. Television producers were eager to capitalize on its new popularity, but couldn't figure out how to reboot the series. (The original actors were now much older than they had been during the original run, but recasting new actors in the same roles was equally problematic.)

Finally, the powers that be came up with the idea to create a series set in the same universe (and with basically the same premise), but with different characters and set 70 years after the original series. (Moving the time period ahead 70 years allowed the producers to update the look of some elements from the original series which were beginning to look outdated even by the 1980s.)

Star Trek: The Next Generation ran for seven seasons, won 18 Emmy Awards, and spun off four movies. When fans are asked which is their favorite Star Trek series, The Next Generation usually wins a plurality of the vote (although not a majority). In future posts, I'll introduce the regular cast, highlight notable guest stars, discuss the most commonly seen aliens and maybe even write a post all about evil twins.

Tribond Tuesday

2010-02-16T15:45:00.001-05:00

Tristan und Isolde
Carmen
Turandot

Lois & Clark and Batman

2010-02-11T21:32:00.002-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, courtesy of Netflix and Hulu*, I found myself watching old episodes of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and Batman: The Animated Series. (I suppose it was my week for '90s television series based on DC Comics characters.)

I was a fan of both series during their original runs, although hadn't seen episodes of either one in over ten years. When I finally saw both series again (and back-to-back), I was amazed at how well the Batman cartoon had aged, and equally amazed at how dated Lois & Clark looked: No internet, no cell phones (but then, phone booths play an important role in the Superman mythos), and it turns out that the fashions of 1993 still held some disturbing echoes of the '80s.

Batman: The Animated Series actually premiered a year earlier, in 1992. However, the production style was strongly inspired by Superman cartoons from the 1940s, as well as the style of the more recent Tim Burton Batman movies. Consequently, the look of the show was a deliberately anachronistic mix of early 20th century props (black and white TVs, fedoras, old-fashioned leather football helmets) and modern or even futuristic technology (computers, all of the various Bat-gadgets, plus any nefarious devices used by the Bat-villain of the week).

Of course, it's not entirely fair to compare a the settings of a live-action series and a cartoon. When the producers of Batman decided on the look of the series, they could just draw whatever props and backgrounds they needed. The producers of Lois & Clark, on the other hand, needed to physically produce clothing, props, and buildings from whatever time period they chose, so it would be much easier to set their story in the present day. (I suppose they could have created whatever they needed digitally—it's not as if the show didn't already have its share of special effects—but that gets expensive, plus, most actors perform better in a physical environment than they do in a digital one.)

The strength of Lois & Clark was always in the writing. Certain elements of the Superman story must remain consistent, but the writers of Lois & Clark worked very hard to come up with reasonable explanations for some of the more far-fetched aspects of the premise. (E.g., Why does a being with godlike powers go around pretending to be a nerdy human reporter? Clark wants a chance at a "normal" life, but he can't resist using his powers to help people once he moves to Metropolis, so he creates the Superman alter ego as a misdirection.) However, making Clark the real person and Superman the disguise, instead of the reverse, actually widened the plot hole (premise hole?) of Lois not being able to recognize that Clark is Superman, since Clark didn't go out of his way to act clumsy or nerdy. The writers also had a lot of fun making Lois and Clark's relationship believable, putting Clark in awkward situations, and cleverly working in references to old Superman catchphrases.

In the end, the show's commitment to more believable characters may have been its undoing. The writers of L&C didn't seem to know what to do with the show after Lois figured out Clark's secret identity, eventually leading to a 5-part episode in which Clark accidentally marries a clone of Lois, while the real Lois develops amnesia. (I wish I was joking.) There's a certain stability to the classic Lois/Clark/Superman love triangle, and moving beyond that may throw the character structure irredeemably off balance. (Perhaps we can even generalize and say that the most durable superhero stories are also the most static.)

One final thing I noticed was that the Lex Luthor of Lois & Clark is actually pretty similar to Bruce Wayne: Both are billionaire businessmen who cultivate a positive public image, but have a hidden agenda. Of course, Lex's hidden agenda is motivated by megalomania, while Bruce Wayne's hidden agenda is motivated by fighting crime. It seems reasonable, then, to end a post on classic superheroes with the reminder that, whatever your powers may be, the important thing is to use them for good.

_________________________
*The episodes of Lois & Clark were actually on the WB website, which I found through a Hulu redirect. It might seem like bad marketing for Hulu to point to a competing video streaming site, but it's actually brilliant because it turns Hulu into both an online video service and a directory of online video services, which ensures that I'll always start with Hulu, even if I ultimately end up somewhere else.

Tribond Tuesday

2010-01-26T17:22:00.000-05:00

David Prowse
James Earl Jones
Sebastian Shaw

Cat. & Reference: Catalog this!

2010-01-19T22:41:00.002-05:00

I had a long weekend (I took Friday off, plus the Monday holiday) and when I came back this morning, I found a copy of a campus departmental newsletter on my chair. I assumed it was dropped off by special collections, since they keep archival copies of university publications and often need me to create serial records for them. (I was, however, a little annoyed that they’d only left me one issue. I’ve told them in the past that I generally need more than that to determine frequency!) I was setting my purse and bag down, taking my coat off, and mentally sorting through whether or not I’d ever cataloged anything from this department before or if I’d have to establish a new corporate heading for them, when I glanced up at the top of the newsletter and noticed that it was preprinted with my name and campus address.

That’s right, folks, I tried to catalog my mail.

(In my defense, my mail is supposed to go in a tray outside my cubicle. Apparently I'll catalog anything if you leave it on my chair.)

Tribond Tuesday

2010-01-05T16:59:00.001-05:00

Castle
The King of Queens
Knight Rider

What's love got to do with It?

2010-01-03T22:21:00.000-05:00

Once in a while, I come across a new idea that fundamentally changes how I see the world. Sometimes the idea turns everything I thought I knew upside down. Other times, the idea fills in a missing puzzle piece in a dozen different situations, unexpectedly finishing a picture that I didn't even realize was incomplete.

Last month-ish, my favorite brother recommended a book called Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. Ariely is a behavioral economist and the book is about how and why we make certain kinds of decisions. One idea he brings up (not original to him, but this is the first I've come across it) is social norms vs. market norms.

In the world of social norms, we do things for each other without expecting financial compensation (in fact, financial compensation is considered insulting and mercenary), but we do expect some sort of social compensation (often by being on the receiving end of a similar favor). In the world of market norms, everything has a price and exchanges are based on that price.

For example, if you go to a restaurant, everything on the menu has a price and you pay for what you order. Likewise, everything in a grocery store has a clear price. Those are market norms. But if you go to your mother's house for Thanksgiving and she fixes you a big meal and you offer to pay her for it, she'll be offended. And if your roommate asks to borrow a cup of milk and you demand 24 cents for it, you'll probably be considered mercenary. However, you're now in a position to ask him or her a small favor. And if the only time you ever spoke to your mother or had contact with her was at Thanksgiving, you'd probably be considered ungrateful.

Market norms aren't bad—without them, we couldn't go grocery shopping if we didn't personally know the store owner. However, social norms are very useful when you want help moving or need to borrow a cup of milk.

Some other thoughts:

• In the last month, two friends have mentioned that they're tired of giving away their professional expertise for free. One said that it's sucking up all of her free time. The other one didn't give specifics, but I gather it's the same issue. (Or she's feeling underappreciated in other ways. Or both.) My first thought on hearing about these situations was "Breakdown of social norms!" It's not that these people are averse to using their professional skills to help their friends, but they're giving out more than they're getting back.

• I think that social norms explain a lot about how online social collaboration works. In theory, no one should be proofreading articles on Wikipedia or combining book editions on LibraryThing or answering questions on the 100 Hour Board for free. In practice, people make those contributions because they like being part of a community. (There may also be a sense of "ownership" involved, whether it's over your article, your tag cloud, or your set of answered questions, so the contribution isn't necessarily entirely altruistic.)

• I recently read an article arguing that we should give cash instead of presents because, on average, we value the gifts we receive at only 80% of their cash value. (I.e., people aren't perfect at picking out gifts, so the gifts lose an average of 20% of their value when they're given.) However, if we give cash, no value is lost in the transaction.

This article rubbed me the wrong way when I read it, but I couldn't put my finger on why until I read about social norms. Reducing the significance of a gift exchange to the market value of the gifts involved ignores the more complex social factors underlying the exchange. (In addition, this argument ignores the value of the "surprise" factor in gift giving, although some people care more about this than others. Perhaps economists, by personality, are less likely to care.)

• Mormon Wards are basically large social exchange markets. We all pitch in for free, but it's OK because everyone else is also pitching in for free. Of course, some people have to do more work than others, but that also seems to go along with more "prestigious" callings. (Is the added level of social prestige necessary to offset the added time investment? Discuss.)

Tribond Tuesday

2009-12-22T11:31:00.001-05:00

Coventry
Essex
Wexford

Pride & Predictability?

2009-12-21T22:00:00.002-05:00

A few days ago, I was surprised to hear a writer on a podcast refer to Pride and Prejudice as a book with a predictable ending. (He didn't mean it in a bad way; it was in the context of a larger discussion on archetypal plots.)

However, I have to admit that I wasn't sure who Lizzie was going to end up with, the first time I saw Pride and Prejudice. (Well, it was probably the second time I'd watched it. Or maybe even the third. Knowing my mother and her love of Jane Austen, I probably "saw" it in utero. What I'm referring to is the first time I actually remember watching it.) Of course, I was pretty young, so maybe I just wasn't as aware of well-formed story structure as I am now.

Did you find the ending of P&P predictable when you first saw or read it?

a. I haven't seen/read it, so I can't comment.
b. Even though I haven't seen/read it, I still know how it ends. It's that culturally pervasive.
c. Yes, I found the ending predictable.
d. No, I didn't find the ending predictable, or, I only predicted the ending after point X in the story.
e. None of the above

Also, what version of P&P did you first encounter?

i. The (unabridged, uncondensed) book.
ii. The 2005 film (with Kiera Knightley)
iii. The 1995 A&E miniseries (with Colin Firth)
iv. The 1980 BBC miniseries (with Elizabeth Garvie)
v. Bride and Prejudice (the Bollywood remake)
vi. Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-day Comedy (the Mormon remake)
vii. none of the above

Christmas carols: Noel nouvelet

2009-11-13T20:30:00.000-05:00

The text of this traditional French carol dates to at least the 15th century, but we have no record of the tune until the 17th century. However, the first five notes are the same as the plainsong "Ave Maria Stella," which gives the tune an older feel.

The title of the song means "Christmas news" and the text tells the story of Jesus' birth, the wise men's visit, and of Simeon the Righteous who held baby Jesus in the Jewish temple. In English, the song is generally sung as "Christmas Comes Anew" or as "Now the Green Blade Riseth," the latter being more appropriate for Easter.

Coro Noialtre:

An a capella version

Unknown group, 2008:

Another a capella version, with more of a Gregorian chant feel.

Jubilate Bronze, 2008:

There is a handbell orchestration of this song which is apparently taking the handbell choir world by storm, because I found about a dozen versions of this on YouTube. I picked the best of the bunch to show you, here, plus a different handbell orchestration as a bonus video.

Bonus: Lynn Andersen, accompanied by Mark Andersen, 2007:

Unfortunately, I can't embed this one, but if you know anything about handbell choirs, you'll be pretty impressed.

Tribond Tuesday

2009-11-10T17:30:00.000-05:00

Life Goes On
Providence
The Wonder Years

"Smart" searches in Google

2009-11-04T18:25:00.008-05:00

Last Monday, Slate Magazine ran an article called “Awkward Suggestions: Let's Have Fun with the Google Search Box.” The article takes Google's predictive search feature (the feature that suggests “Michelle Obama” if you start typing “michelle o”) and compares what “less intelligent” vs. “more intelligent” people are searching for, by comparing queries that start with “less intelligent” and “more intelligent” phrases, such as “how 2” vs. “how might one.”

I agree that it's interesting that typing in “how 2" prompts phrases such as “how 2 kiss” and “how 2 get a six pack,” while typing in “how might one” prompts phrases such as “how might one treat poisoning from curare” and “how might one discover a new piece of music.” However, I take issue with the notion that one search is “less intelligent” and one is “more intelligent.” They're both bad searches.

Imagine the search query “how to grow bananas.” Now imagine two web pages, one titled “how to kill ninjas” and one titled “tips on growing bananas.” The second one is clearly more relevant to the search, but the first title is actually closer to the search query, because it matches 2/4 words, while the second one matches only 1/4 words. Our smart human brains know that “bananas” is more important to the query than “how” and “to,” but computers don't know this unless programmers tell them.

What search engine programmers do, then, is give the computer a list of “stop words,” or, words to ignore when matching documents to searches. The actual stop words will vary from program to program, but they typically include pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, modals, and some adverbs. Here is a good sample list.

So, now that our search engine is armed with a stop list, it knows to ignore the words “how” and “to,” which means that “kill ninjas” has 0/2 words in common with the original query while, “growing bananas” is a better match at 1/2. (The reason it's still only 1/2 is that computers also don't know that the words “grow” and “growing” are close enough that someone who searches for one is probably also interested in pages containing the other. Introducing a “synonym ring” which equates “grow” and “growing” allows a search engine to match queries containing one term with results containing the other.)

My point (and I do have one) is that all of the search strings compared in the article are composed entirely of stop words. The results for “how 2 tie a tie,” “how might one tie a tie” and “tie a tie” are virtually identical, because including stop words in a Google search query has almost no effect on the search results. Slate Magazine isn't comparing “more intelligent” and “less intelligent” queries, they're just casually-worded bad queries and hifalutin bad queries.

Tribond Tuesday

2009-10-27T16:49:00.001-04:00

Bacon
Marlowe
Oxford

(bonus points if you can think of anyone else)

Tribond Tuesday

2009-10-20T17:00:00.000-04:00

Black-capped chickadee
Eastern white pine
Tourmaline

Tribond Tuesday

2009-10-13T17:09:00.000-04:00

child
brother
ox

Christmas carols: Oi Betleem!

2009-10-09T20:20:00.001-04:00

This is a Basque carol with English lyrics written by Sabine Baring-Gould. I found a version sung in the original Basque on YouTube, but it was absolutely terrible, so I'm embedding an English-language version, instead.

Just to remind you of what a truly funky language Basque is, I'm copying out the first verse and English gloss:

Oi Betleem!
Ala egun zoure gloriak,
Oi Betleem!
Hanitch beitu distiatzen!
Zoure ganik heltu argiak,
Bethatzen tu bazter guziak,
Oi Betleem!

O Bethlehem! Ah! how your glory today shines out brightly! The light that comes from you fills every corner.

Unknown choir:

Honorable Mention:

Like I said, I couldn't find a good Basque-language version on YouTube, but I did find this version by The American Boychoir at Yahoo Music.

Rallying the troops

2009-10-07T21:30:00.000-04:00

Over the last several days, I've had a couple of friends ask me to vote for them in online contests. One of them lets you cast a vote once a day, and as I've seen my friend's entry rise in the stats, I've realized that success in these types of contests is due more to an ability to mobilize masses of friends than it is to innate talent. Don't get me wrong — I wouldn't support either of these people if I didn't think they had talent and deserved to succeed — but I'm not actually invested in either competition and I suspect that most of the people who are voting are in a similar position.

I got to thinking about how I might try and fix such a system so that more people were voting for people besides their friends. I think I would set up the voting system so that everyone who wanted to vote for someone would also be presented with four other randomly selected entries and required to cast a "second place vote" for one of them. For the sake of honesty, the second place vote would probably need to count less than a "first place" vote, but since the second place votes would presumably be made without personal bias, they could end up determining the winner.

Thoughts?

Tribond Tuesday

2009-10-06T16:30:00.000-04:00

reporter
librarian
millionaire playboy

Cat. & Reference: EBSCO and libraries

2009-10-03T19:35:00.000-04:00

I like to listen to the radio in the mornings when I'm getting ready to go to work. By "the radio," I mean "NPR." (I hear tell they've got some newfangled stations that play songs just like a jukebox, but I like the news, thanks.)

However, my local NPR station is currently playing an underwriter announcement (NOT a commercial) that is driving me nuts. The announcement says something like "[Program X] is underwritten by EBSCO. EBSCO partners with libraries to make full-text databases available to patrons nationwide."

EBSCO is a library vendor. Libraries pay them for a subscription to their databases. I have no problem with this arrangement, but saying that EBSCO partners with libraries makes it sound like EBSCO is some sort of charitable nonprofit organization, instead of a business involved in a capitalistic enterprise. I might as well say that the local grocery story partners with me to make dinner or that the gas station partners with me to make my car run.

Don't get me wrong, I have no particular beef with EBSCO. Without them, I wouldn't be able to read online issues of The Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology. (A tragedy, indeed!) I'd just rather their NPR spots weren't misleading.

Christmas carols: I wonder as I wander

2009-10-02T20:21:00.001-04:00

My apologies for the length of time I've gone without posting a one of these; I've been sick, of late, and haven't had the time or energy to research and compose a Christmas carol post.

This week's carol is "I wonder as I wander." It was first published in 1934 in a book called Songs of the Hill-Folk by a man who claimed it was a folk song he'd heard in North Carolina. However, he later admitted that some of the "folk songs" in the book were either partly or wholly his own invention. Either way, it's a nice song.

Alfie Boe, December 2007:

A tenor solo.

Satoshi Matsuyama, February 2006:

This video has me convinced that "I wonder as I wander" should only be performed on tenor sax.

Gruppo di Musica Contemporanea Steffani, December 2008:

This version sounds very modern to me. I'd love for someone who knows more about music to tell me what's going on.

Honorable Mention:

Duke University Vespers Ensemble (unaccompanied mixed choir), this harp solo (described as a traditional spiritual work with a touch of Jimi Hendrix) and Rezound (a bell choir).

Tribond Tuesday: Special Duo-bond Edition

2009-09-29T17:47:00.001-04:00

This is sort of dumb, but it makes me giggle every time I think about it:

1. God
2. The belly dancer in this video

Tribond Tuesday

2009-09-22T18:22:00.000-04:00

drop
swash
small

The Algonquin Cinderella

2009-09-21T21:33:00.000-04:00

Last week I read a picture book called The Rough-Face Girl. (Whenever a group of children's books comes through our department, I generally read a few of them for fun.) In a nutshell, the story is about a girl with a scarred face (from having to sit too close to the fire) who triumphs over her vain older sisters to marry a mysterious Invisible Being.

The dustjacket blurb called it a "powerful Cinderella story" and there are definitely a lot of Cinderella-esque elements in it (i.e., a protagonist who sits by the fire and competes with two sisters for an eligible bachelor). Some obvious Cinderella elements are also missing: glass slippers (or any kind of special shoes or clothing), a bride-finding ball (or any special gathering), and supernatural intervention in getting to the ball (although the groom, himself, has supernatural elements).

I've seen and read many variations on the Cinderella story. We counted once that my mother had no fewer than ten different versions on VHS when I was growing up: two ballets, one opera, three musicals, one cartoon, one version with Muppets, etc. (My mother was insistent that we would not grow up thinking that the Disney version was the only one out there.) However, this Algonquin story raised questions that the other Cinderella versions never had. If this tale predated European contact, was it merely a coincidence that it resembled the tale made famous by the Grimms and Perrault? Was it reflective of some sort of Jungian collective subconscious? Or had the folktale been shaped to fit a story more familiar to Americans?

Closer reading of a note in the front indicated that the original tale is longer and more complex. Maybe I'll see if I can track it down, for comparison.

Tribond Tuesday

2009-09-15T17:18:00.001-04:00

bacchanalian
martial
narcissistic

Pride & Prejudice, retold

2009-09-13T19:07:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I watched Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood version of (as you might have guessed) Pride and Prejudice. It was very cute to see the way they transformed all of the P&P situations and characters into Indian / Bollywood equivalents.

The movie reminded a theory of story retellings developed by a friend of mine. (The theory was an offshoot of a theory of plot types that became her master's thesis.) Because I'm sure you're all so very curious to hear about it, I've pieced together what I can remember of Eotena's Theory of Peircean Story Retellings, using Pride and Prejudice as an example (where possible).

Reflex - Pride and Prejudice (1995 BBC / A&E version) This is the most straightforward retelling, because it doesn't attempt to alter the story at all. Other Pride and Prejudice movie versions of the Reflex include the 1980 BBC version and the 2005 Kiera Knightly version.

Plot - Bride & Prejudice The most distinctive feature of this type of retelling is that it looks very different from the original version, but otherwise tells pretty much the same story. So, if you saw a still frame of Bride and Prejudice, you probably couldn't guess what story it is. However, if you're at all familiar with Pride and Prejudice, you'll soon notice that Lalita Bakshi, Mr. Kholi, and Will Darcy bear a striking resemblance to Lizzie Bennett, Mr. Collins, and Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Another Plot version of Pride and Prejudice is Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-day Comedy (a modern Mormon version of the story). Again, if you saw a screenshot of the movie, you wouldn't know what story it was telling, but as soon as the characters start acting out their parts, you recognize the story.

Pattern - Bridget Jones' Diary This type of retelling keeps the underlying structure of the story, but in an even more abstract, almost archetypal way than the Plot version. In Bridget Jones' Diary, almost all of the supporting cast is gone, including the rest of the Bennett sisters and the Bingleys. The original Pride and Prejudice elements have been reduced to the interactions between Lizzy/Bridget, Wickham/Daniel, and Darcy/Darcy, which is, after all, the core of the story.

Reimagining - Mr. Darcy's Diary This is the original story "turned inside out." Generally, the plot and setting remain very much the same, but the main characters and supporting characters have been swapped, or the good and bad characters reversed, or the story is otherwise told from someone else's perspective.

Other, non-P&P examples include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (a reimagining of Hamlet) and Wicked (a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz).

*****

The last two retellings are a bit different because they only retell or suggest part of the story. Also, I wasn't able to think of any Pride & Prejudice-based versions of these, so I'm going to switch to Cinderella, instead.

Trope - Ex.: dressing up as Cinderella for Halloween. This is the opposite of the Plot type. Where Plot is all about a different look with the same story underneath, Trope is all about a recognizable static appearance. (After all, the actions of Halloween are the same for everyone — go from door to door asking for candy — so the character has to be recognizable from the appearance and props, alone.)

This illustration of Cinderella by Michelle Gorski also relies on tropes (in this case, a ballgown, glass shoes, and a shoe left behind) to convey the identity of the subject.

Image - Only You This is a retelling that references an entire scene from the original story, but is, ultimately, telling a different story. In Only You, Faith loses her shoe as she runs through the streets of Venice. Peter finds it, and chases after her to return it. (He even shouts "Cenerentola!" after her.) You can think of Image as halfway between Trope and Reflex: More than a static image (as in Trope), but less than the full story (as in Reflex). (Personally, I find the term Image a bit confusing, since I think of it as as referring to a static picture, but I'm sticking with the terminology as I originally learned it.)

*****

So, there you have it. One more way of organizing the world.

Christmas carols: March of the Kings

2009-09-11T17:22:00.000-04:00

I didn't post a carol last week — I'm not sure why. (We can pretend that I was terribly offended by the comments from two weeks ago. People! Grow up!)

Anyway, this week's carol is best known in English as "The March of the Kings." Its original French title is "Ce matin, j'ai rencontré le train." (The even originaler Provençal title is "De matin ai rescountra lou trin," depending on the level of snob factor you're going for.)

Also, I thought this was a pretty well-known carol, so I was surprised very few videos of it. How many of you have heard it before?

Pitt Men's Glee Club, 2007:

The sound quality in this isn't great, but the harmony is nice and they're singing in the original(ish) French.

Unknown handbell choir, 2006:

An instrumental version arranged for handbells. (Also, you have to admit that the scales look pretty cool.)

Trans-Siberian Orchestra, November 2007:

Tribond Tuesday

2009-09-08T17:25:00.003-04:00

David O. McKay
Joseph F. Smith
Harold B. Lee

P is for a Pair of Pauls

2009-09-05T12:23:00.000-04:00

One semester when I was at BYU, I had a physics class with two guys named Paul. (Actually, almost all of the guys I met that semester seemed to be named Paul, and all the girls seemed to be named Sara(h). It was kind of odd, but at least it made the names easy to remember.)

So, there were two Pauls in my physics class and one was really cute while the other one was . . . clean-cut and wholesome looking (like 98% of the guys at BYU), but otherwise not my type.

One day, for complicated reasons*, a girl came by my house to introduce herself as the fiancée of Paul from my physics class. "Which one?" I asked, since I didn't know the last name of either. She tried to describe him, but the two Pauls were both medium-tall with dark blond hair and a lean build. Finally, half joking, I asked "Is he the cute one?" "Yeah!" she said, her eyes lighting up. "He's the cute one."

Dang, I thought, The cute one's engaged.

The next day, not-cute Paul came up to me and said "I hear you met my fiancée."

I came very close to saying "You're not the cute one!" when I suddenly realized that, due to the hormonal daze in which a person in love finds him or herself, whichever Paul was her fiancé would be "the cute one" in her mind. (I think about this every now and then when I'm thinking about shared frames of reference.)
__________
* If you must know, she came by my house to set me up on a blind date, which is odd, because a blind date usually means that you know the person setting you up, but not the person you're going out with. If you don't know either, does that make it a double-blind date? And does that make the results of the date statistically significant?

Tribond Tuesday

2009-09-01T17:42:00.002-04:00

Andrew
Ivan
Rita

(Bonus points if you can guess which one I have a personal connection to.)

Christmas carols: Nowel: Owt of your slepe aryse

2009-08-28T17:45:00.000-04:00

This carol comes from the Selden manuscript at the Bodleian Library and dates to the mid-fifteenth century.

It's always tough when I only find one video of a carol, because I either have to go with the recording (no matter how bad it is) or leave the carol out of my series. Luckily for me, this rendition is lovely, even if there are some background noise issues.

Meghan Coviello, Kris Martin-Baker, and Amy Travis, 2008:

Tribond Tuesday

2009-08-25T17:29:00.001-04:00

Sean Penn
Susan Sarandon
Jamie Lee Curtis

(I think this one's a bit harder than the others have been, so I'll post a hint tomorrow if no one gets it.)

Christmas carols: The Angel Gabriel from heaven came

2009-08-21T20:29:00.001-04:00

This is a traditional Basque carol which was collected in 1895 by Charles Bordes. Alas, I was not able to find any versions sung in Basque, although I did find one in Welsh. (Welsh, Basque, they're both . . . not English, right?)

Choir of King's College, Cambridge, 2007(?):

Aled Jones, 2007:

Idiom breaking

2009-08-21T08:19:00.000-04:00

I want to start throwing (perfectly innocuous) French phrases into my casual conversation, and then say "Pardon my French."

Tribond Tuesday

2009-08-18T17:26:00.000-04:00

four
cinco
tri

("Tri" is Welsh for "three." Most of you probably know that "cinco" is Spanish for five. )

Cat. & Reference: Taking it on faith

2009-08-15T19:54:00.000-04:00

Catalogers are supposed to be unbiased. We are supposed to accept, at face value, the information in the books we works we come across. If we think someone's made a mistake, we can supply corrections or explanatory notes in brackets, but that's about it.

The upshot of this is that if someone says that they channeled the spirit of a dead person who wrote a book through them, the cataloger has to put the dead person as the author. (The medium who channeled the spirit is cataloged as an "added entry," which means someone who helped out with the creation of the work, but isn't considered primarily responsible for its content. Translators, illustrators, and editors are other common "added entry" roles.)

Of course, a good cataloger also gives patrons the proper information they need to make a choice about material selection, and that information probably includes whether or not a book was written by a living person or through a medium.

The official way to distinguish between the two types of authors is to add the word "Spirit" in parentheses after the author's name. That way, the two authors show up together when browsing, but books written by each are ultimately kept separate in the catalog.

You'd be surprised at how many famous people have written books from beyond the grave. (You wouldn't be surprised, perhaps, that it's mostly famous people who seem to be doing it.)

The Library of Congress owns books written by the spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (fittingly, since he was very involved in spiritualism in his later years), as well as John Lennon, Princess Diana and Sitting Bull.

Lest I start sounding a bit smug, it's worth noting that most people (and, presumably, most librarians) don't believe that Joseph Smith actually translated The Book of Mormon from an ancient source. And yet, because he's listed as the translator on the title page of The Book of Mormon, that's how he's credited in the catalog records (such as this one).

Of course, "Mormon" isn't credited as an editor or compiler, so I guess you can only suspend disbelief for so long. And I was going to say that the records didn't include an language code variable field, either (a field that includes 3-letter codes for the language of translation and original language of the book), but then I came a cross a record which does include them (here). (The "eng" stands for English and the "und" stands for "undetermined," I guess because there isn't a standard ISO 639-2 language code for "Reformed Egyptian.")

For some reason it gives me cataloger warm fuzzies to know that some Library of Congress librarian actually bothered to add in translation codes for The Book of Mormon.

Christmas carols: Psallite Unigenito

2009-08-14T17:51:00.000-04:00

This carol is often credited to Michael Praetorius, but the music is actually an older French melody. The New Oxford Book of Carols refers to this piece as "macaronic," which sent me to the dictionary to discover that it means "mixed language," especially Latin mixed with a vernacular language (in this case, Latin and German).

I found several recordings of this, and I liked this one best:

Ensemble D.E.U.M., November 2008:

On average

2009-08-12T17:18:00.002-04:00

Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot is supposed to have quipped "I was born in Poland and raised in France, so I am, on average, German."

Having spent most of my live in Utah, but the last four years in Illinois and Maine, I am, on average, a Coloradan. (From somewhere in Routt County, to be precise.)

Where are you from?

(n.b. I calculated this by averaging and the latitude and longitude of the places I've lived after weighting them by how long I've lived there, which would tend to bias my answer towards the north, due to the uneven spacing between lines of longitude. However, Urbana and Provo are actually at almost the exact same latitude and I've spent 93% of of my life in either one or the other, so I trust that Maine is not exerting an undue influence. Someone who had spent, say, 18 months as far north as Sweden would be well advised not to take the same mathematical shortcut.)

Tribond Tuesday

2009-08-11T17:13:00.001-04:00

James Bond
Star Trek: The Next Generation
The Lost Islands*

*I confess to not having been familiar with this program before I went looking for something to complete the set, thus, the Wikipedia link.

Being difficult

2009-08-08T19:09:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine was born in South Africa, but he and his family now live in the US. Because of this, he figures he's as "African-American" as anyone, even though he's not black.

Another friend of mine refuses to mark "Caucasian" on forms, because he's spent time in the Caucasus and doesn't look like people from that area. If "white" is not available as an option, he fills in "other" and writes "European-American."

I, in turn, think my skin is not "white," but "peachy-pinkish-brown" (although I haven't gone so far as to write this on any forms).

Christmas carols: God rest ye merry, gentlemen

2009-08-07T17:30:00.001-04:00

I've been slacking off on these, but now that I have my new computer, I've no excuse. This week's carol is "God rest ye merry, gentlemen," a traditional English carol. While doing research for this carol, I realized for the first time that the title isn't [God rest ye] [merry gentlemen] (more or less "Rest, merry gentlement"), but [God rest ye merry] [gentlemen] (closer to "stay merry, gentlemen." What a difference a comma makes.

Sissel, 2007(?):

A version sung by Sissel, the Norwegian coloratura soprano. This isn't the most traditional arrangement, but I liked it the best of the vocal versions I heard.

Stu and Sniper, 2007:

An instrumental jazz duet on piano.

Unknown group, 2008:

A celtic arrangement. Go to about one minute in if you want to skip the introduction.

Bonus: Barenaked Ladies, 2007:

Tribond Tuesday

2009-08-04T16:37:00.000-04:00

6:59
10:01
2:22

I liked it

2009-08-04T13:35:00.002-04:00

A few years ago, I was talking with a friend about a classic 20th century novel. He’d read it, but I never had, even though it was vaguely on my mental list of “books I ought to read someday.” I asked, “Is it good?” He paused and said, “I liked it,” with a definite stress on the first person implying “but I don’t guarantee that you will.”

After I read it, I could see why he’d phrased the recommendation in just that way, since some people might have been uncomfortable with the violence, language, and sexual references in the book. Or maybe wouldn’t have cared for the somewhat disjointed writing style. (The book was Slaughterhouse-Five, if you’re wondering.)

As it turned out, though, I loved it, and ended up reading a dozen more Kurt Vonnegut books over the next couple of years.

A recent conversation with Melyngoch about R-rated movies, as well as her latest post at Zelophehad’s Daughters, has got me thinking again about media and Mormon standards again.

To be fair, there are good reasons for not watching R-rated movies. If my goal is to encourage critical thinking and good judgment, making a blanket statement that everyone has to watch something is as bad making a blanket statement that says nobody should watch it.

Along those lines, I feel like I’m pretty willing to “enter into someone else’s world,” so to speak. I’m comfortable hanging out with people who drink or are living their significant other or who are staunch atheists. I get that they’re making choices I wouldn’t make, but I feel that the sum total of a person goes beyond that and I’ve found that they’re often willing to meet me halfway, as well.

But when I’m hanging out with more conservative Mormons (or “average” Mormons, but we’ll get to whether or not they’re actually average in a minute), I feel like I'm the one who has to make all of the social compromises, for fear of doing irreparable damage to their tender little psyches if they (to quote Melyngoch) discover “I’m not the Mormon [they] thought I was” and “react as if betrayed.” (If you think that’s an overstatement, allow me to direct you to Board Question #23236.)

It’s a vicious circle, of course. The more quiet I am about my actual feelings and interests, the more I let people assume that the “Deseret Book Mormon” is the only kind of faithful Mormon that exists. (For all I know, the Church is full of kindred spirits, only we keep missing each other because we don’t speak up.)

So, I feel that I should be able to say “Pan’s Labyrinth is an amazing film.” Period. “The Backslider is one of the most faith-affirming books I've ever read.” Period. No asterisks, no qualifiers, no apologies.

It’s not that I’m out to deceive anyone by tricking them into watching or reading something they’d rather not. If someone asked me, straight up, whether there was anything potentially objectionable in the film or book, I’d be happy to give them an honest evaluation. But I don’t think I should have to add a warning statement to all of my recommendation unless specifically asked for one.

See, I’m a big fan of research. The way I look at it, If I go to the trouble of reading reviews and checking detailed ratings to decide if I want to see a movie or not, you can do it, too. Of course, talking to friends and family members who’ve seen the movie is another part of doing research, and when I talk to them, it’s sort of understood that they’re not just recommending a movie or book, they’re recommending it to me, and I’d be pretty annoyed if they failed to mention something in it that I might find hugely upsetting or problematic. Which is quite possibly what my more conservative friends expect of me, as well.

So maybe I should just learn to say “I liked it . . .”

New computer

2009-08-02T19:06:00.001-04:00

About a month ago, my old laptop's motherboard died. Since my laptop was too old to be worth fixing up, I decided to buy a new one, which just arrived last week.

Things I like:

1. The color

Online, the laptop colors looked like something out of the late '90s iMac era. In real life, though, the colors are actually much more muted and opalescent. It's a pity, since I would probably have gone with purple if I'd known what it would actually look like. (I went with blue.)

2. That it's not a Mac

Don't get me wrong — I am infinitely grateful for the the loan of my roommate's school computer over the last six weeks. However, I am greatly fond of keyboard shortcuts and I find my style rather cramped without access to Home, Delete, Pg Up, and Pg Down buttons. (The Mac has a key called "Delete," but it functions the same as a PC "Backspace," which is to say that it deletes characters to the left of the cursor. What I was lacked was a button that deleted characters to the right.)

3. The Vista widgets

I was not at all excited about upgrading to Windows Vista, and even looked into Dell's program where you can pay extra and stick with Windows XP (but it wasn't available on the model of laptop I wanted). I'm not a fan of change, generally, and I'm still having some trouble finding my way around on the thing, but I actually kind of like some of the little widgets that came with it, including the clock and weather button.

4. The super long battery life

It probably helps that I don't have many programs loaded on this computer, but my battery life is crazy long right now. (I'm sure it also helps that I opted for the dual battery option.)

Things I don't like:

1. The twitchy trackpad

I don't know how to describe my trackpad issues any better than to call it "twitchy." I've turned down the sensitivity quite a bit and slowed down the cursor movement so that I don't go flying across the screen unexpectedly. In all likelihood, my old laptop was so old that the trackpad had become very unresponsive, so that's what I've gotten used to.

2. The lack of a 10 key pad

I know that laptops don't generally have 10 key pads, but my old laptop had one on the main keypad that you could access by holding down the blue function key. One of the main things I used it for was special character shortcuts, such as Alt + 0233 = é. Inexplicably, the shortcuts don't work with the top row numbers — with the keypad numbers — and I'm already getting annoyed at having to find workarounds to pull up the em-dashes for this sentence, for example.

3. The keyboard

In addition to the trackpad being twitchy, the keyboard is squishy.

4. Virus software issues

My computer came with a McAfee trial, but I'm supposed to get a free version of Symantec through the university. I had to uninstall McAfee in order to install Symantec, but the Symantec version that's supposed to be compatible with my operating system isn't working properly. So my computer is currently immuno-compromised. (This isn't technically Dell's fault, but it's still a problem until I can get our IT people to fix it.)

Tribond Tuesday

2009-07-28T17:00:00.001-04:00

Sigourney Weaver
Mary McDonnell
Stockard Channing

Christmas carols: Quando nascette ninno

2009-07-24T17:35:00.001-04:00

This is a traditional Neapolitan shepherd's carol. The only version I liked was instrumental, so I'll give you the words to the first verse:

Quando nascette Ninno a Bettelemme,
Era notte a parea mmiezo juorno!
Maje le stelle
Lustere belle,
Se vedettero accusi!
La chiù lucente
Jette a chiammà li Magi, in Oriente.

When Christ, the Son of Mary, in Bethlehem was born,
'Twas night, and yet the light was bright as summer's morn!
Stars were gleaming,
Brightly beaming
O'er the town of Bethlehem
A brighter star there shone
For magi far, a guiding star that led them on.

Fans of Handel's Messiah will notice a striking similarity between this tune and "He shall feed his flock." Scholars have postulated that Handel may have heard the song when he visited Rome in his youth.

Guitar orchestra of the Ivanka pri Dunaji music school, 2007:

Tribond Tuesday

2009-07-21T17:07:00.001-04:00

Godwin
Grimm
Ohm

Things I have learned in Primary

2009-07-19T19:42:00.001-04:00

1. Kids act up because they're bored

I sympathize with bored, restless kids because I hated primary. It bored me to tears. (Literally. I used to cry on Saturday nights because I had to go to primary the next day. Or maybe it was on Sunday nights because I had to go to school and be bored. I'll have to check.)

So, sometimes the thing is to give them more to do (at an age-appropriate level), not less. And if they can get up and move around, so much the better.

2. Sign language is great

I forgot about using sign language to learn songs because it didn't work well with the first song I tought them in May. (The song was very short and full of proper names, and sign language doesn't help much for those.) Come the end of June, we'd been working on a song all month and the kids still weren't getting it. Then I introduced sign language and we learned almost the entire song in one day.

To do justice to my linguistics training, I should point out that we're not learning actual sign language (whose grammar is entirely different from English). And we're not even doing proper Signed English, because we're not signing all of the grammar words, just the major content words. (You'd think we could just make up actions to go to the words, but it doesn't work as well as the actual ASL signs. I'm not sure what the significance of that is.) It also helps them remember some of the more arcane vocabulary. (I.e., the sign for "abound" looks like "lots and lots.")

Christmas carols: O little town of Bethlehem

2009-07-17T17:13:00.003-04:00

When I started working on this project, I decided that I wanted to see if I could spend the first six months highlighting only more obscure carols. Now that it's July, I figured it was finally time to cover a more popular carol.

The first thing I noticed when doing research on this carol was that most of the recordings I heard used a different melody than the one I thought was standard. The melody I know (the one that appears in the LDS hymn book) was written by Lewis Redner in 1868 and was the original melody for the tune. It's also referred to as "St. Louis."

The other setting is a traditional melody called "Forest Green," first collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1903 and now apparently the standard tune for this carol in England. (This tune also appears in the LDS hymn book as the melody for "I saw a mighty angel fly.")

Further research revealed that there is still another common melody for this carol which was written by Henry Walford Davies and published in 1978.

"St. Louis": Susan Paree (voice and harp), 2006(?):

Tune: St. Louis

"Forest Green": Kiri te Kanawa and Unknown Choir:

Tune: Forest Green

Aled Jones and the Westminster Cathedral Choir, ca. 1980(?):

Walford Davies melody

Honorable Mention: The honorable mention recordings cover a variety of musical genres, including brass ensemble (Salvation Army, Hythe Band), barbershop quartet (On This Rock), gospel (The Clark Sisters), contemporary Christian, (First Call), and The King (who is a genre unto himself),

Tribond Tuesday

2009-07-07T19:31:00.002-04:00

Tribond is a game where you are given three things and you have to figure out what they have in common. There's an ongoing Tribond thread on another forum I frequent, but it turns out that I like coming up with Tribond clues more than I like solving other people's clues, so the thread often lies dormant for months at a time.

As an outlet for my Tribond-coming-up-with impulses, I figure maybe I'll start posting them here so that my beloved readers can have the pleasure of solving them. We'll see how it goes.

Puzzle #1:

alphabet

fuþark

QWERTY keyboard

In which I do the mocking, in my turn

2009-07-06T19:33:00.003-04:00

[Necessary background info: (1) I am the primary chorister. (2) There is a family in the ward whose mother is German, so the kids speak it a little, but I get the impression they're not fully bilingual.]

Yesterday was the first Sunday of the month, so it was time to teach my primary kids a new song. When I'm teaching a new song, one of the first things I like to do is go over any of the hard or unusual words and explain what they mean (and sometimes we act them out or do silly things so we can remember them). When I got to the word "proclaim," I went to the podium and made a loud announcement, and then explained that "to proclaim" is kind of like "to announce."

One of my kids said "I proclaim that we must all now speak German!" I laughed and said that was a good example of a proclamation and started to go on to the next word. "Nein, nein!" he interrupted, "Auf deutsch!"

I gave him my best "Oh, honey, you have no idea" look and said: "Meinetwegen ist das keine gute Ahnung weil est gibt nur du und ich die sprechen können. Stimmt?"*

He looked stunned and didn't say anything, but his teacher laughed at him (and we continued in English).

See here for a previous episode of "Katya smacks down a 10-year-old."

____________________

*"In my opinion, that's not a good idea because there's only you and I that can speak [it]. Do you agree?" (If there be faults, they are the faults of Katya not having studied German in over nine years.)

Christmas carols: Lo! he comes, with clouds descending

2009-07-03T16:57:00.000-04:00

I don't yet have a new laptop, but I've managed to pull this together while borrowing a friend's.

The history of this carol begins with John Cennick, an 18th century convert to Methodism. John Cennick wrote the text for an Advent hymn, which in turn inspired John Wesley (one of the founders of the Methodist movement), to write more verses for it. (Cennick's original text became verses 3 and 4 of the current version. Wesley's contribution became verses 1, 2, and 5-7). The tune was written by Martin Madan, another Methodist convert.

I only liked one YouTube version of this enough to post it, and it doesn't include any voices, so I'm giving you the first verse of the song:

Lo! he comes with clouds descending,
Once for favoured sinners slain;
Thousand, thousand saints, attending,
Swell the triumph of his train.
Hallelujah! hallelujah! hallelujah!
God appears on earth to reign.

Unknown organist, Stahlhuth organ, Friedenskirche (Meckenheim, Germany), 2007:

In which I am thoroughly mocked

2009-07-02T19:02:00.000-04:00

Saturday, Kelly was sitting at the table working a math problem related to paying some bills. I was on her computer (my own having died earlier in the week), so I offered to bring up the calculator function on it.

"That's OK," she said, "My phone has a calculator."

"Oh, yeah," I said, "It would." Then I added, "My new phone has a calculator, but I'm kind of bummed that it doesn't have a square root function."

"You're disappointed that your phone doesn't have a square root function?!" she asked, incredulously. (Apparently this is not a very credulous thing to say.)

"Well, yeah," I said, defensively, "I was lying in bed the other night thinking about square roots—"

"You were lying in bed thinking about square roots?!" (Apparently this did not help my case.)

So then I had to go back and explain even more to show her that it was perfectly reasonable for me to be lying in bed thinking about square roots. (Cue flashback sequence.)

***

Like Michael Jackson, my laptop unexpectedly met its demise last week. Because of this, I'm shopping for a new laptop, ideally one that's a bit smaller. I saw a good deal on laptops with an 10" monitor, but I wasn't really sure how small of a screen that would be. (As you may or may not know, computer monitors are measured diagonally, so it can be hard to picture the actual dimensions of the monitor without referring to a ruler.)

I was thinking about this in bed and then I thought that maybe it would help if I could compare the size to an 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper. Of course, to do that, I'd need to figure out the diagonal length of such a sheet of paper. I got as far as a^2 + b^2, but then I couldn't figure out the square root in my head.

So I grabbed my phone, which was by my alarm clock, and flipped it open to use the square root function . . . which proved to be sadly nonexistent. (In retrospect, I could have tried squaring different numbers until I got close to the number whose root I wanted, but give me a break, I was half asleep!)

***

So, now that I have explained myself, I'm sure you can see how perfectly reasonable my train of thought was. All the same, I think I'm going to go lift some weights so I don't get my lunch money stolen tomorrow.

Please stand by

2009-06-26T16:58:00.000-04:00

Due to technical difficulties (namely, the unexpected demise of my laptop on Monday), there will be no Christmas carols blog post this week. Please stay tuned for further updates.

A dime a dozen

2009-06-20T21:10:00.000-04:00

The English word "dozen" means "about twelve" and comes from the French word douzaine, which means the same thing. (If you're talking about things that come in sets of exactly twelve (i.e., eggs) then it's probably fair to say that "dozen" means "exactly twelve." Otherwise, I'd say the meaning is more fluid.)

English doesn't have many "about X number" words. Another one is "a couple," which means "about two." (I don't think the meaning extends so far as "one" or "three," but I think it could easily mean anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5, if referring to a mass noun.) However, we still make the most of these two expressions, by employing variants such as "a half dozen" ("about six") and "a couple dozen" ("about twenty-four").

Back to French. The word douzaine comes from the word douze (twelve) plus the suffix -aine. The cool thing about -ained, though, is that it can be added to a lot of different numbers. So you can also say huitaine for "about eight" and dixaine for "about ten" and vingtaine for "about twenty."

You can't add -aine to any old number, though. It seems to be most common with numbers that are multiples of ten, but even then, there are some exceptions. In order to get a better grasp on the distribution, I did a Google search to see which forms are the most common. I ignored numbers which returned under 1,000 hits, graphed the rest of them logarthmically, and added notes for the ones with skewed results:

Key:

X = 1,000-1,300 hits on Google with the domain limited to sites ending in ".fr"
XX = 1,301-9,999
XXX = 10,000-13,000
XXXX = 13,001-99,999
XXXXX = 100,000-130,000
XXXXXX = 130,001-999,999
XXXXXXX = 1,000,000-1,300,000
XXXXXXXX = 1,301,000-9,999,999

Data:

XXXX - quatraine - from quatre (4) *
XXXX - septaine - from sept (7)†
XXXXX - huitaine - huit (8)‡
XXXX - neuvaine - neuf (9)§
XXXX - dixaine - dix (10)
XXXXXXXX - douzaine - douze (12)
XX - quatorzaine - quatorze (14)
XXXXXXXX - quinzaine - quinze (15)
XXXXXXXX - vingtaine - vingt (20)
XXXXXXX - trentaine - trente (30)
XXXXXXX - quarantaine - quarante (40)
XXXXXXX - cinquantaine - cinquante (50)
XXXXXX - soixantaine - soixante (60)
XXXXXXXX - centaine - cent (100)

*Also the name of a type of poetic stanza (i.e., quatrain)
†Also part of a town name (Savigny-en-Septaine)
‡Can also mean "about a week"
§Also the name of a type of prayer recitation (i.e., novena)

Of the fourteen words with more than 1,000 hits, half are based on multiples of ten. Of the seven numbers that aren't multiples of ten, there are none higher than 15. No compound numbers can take the suffix. (The three missing multiples of ten are all compound numbers in standard French. 70 is "soixante-dix" (lit. "sixty-ten"), 80 is "quatre-vingt" ("four-twenty"), and 90 is "quatre-vingt-dix" ("four-twenty-ten"). There are alternate versions of these numbers in the regional dialects of Switzerland and Belgium which aren't compound nouns: "septante," "huitante" and "nonante." I found around 500 hits for "septantaine" and around 100 each for "huitantaine" and "nonantaine," but it's hard to say how significant the results are, since "septante," etc., are, themselves, less common regional variants.)

I'm not sure what conclusion to draw, except that simple numbers take the -aine suffix better than complex numbers, and 100 ("cent"), seems to be the highest number that can do so. ("Mille" — 1,000 — is also a simple number, but I didn't find many hits for "millaine.")

Speaking of "a hundred" and "a thousand" (and back to English), I think that "a hundred" is also more vague than saying "one hundred" (likewise for "a thousand" and "one thousand). For example, if you say you've done something "a hundred times," it has a different feel than if you say you've done it "one hundred times."

I've been working on this post, off and on, for over a dozen days, so I think I'm ready to call it done.