david's web-log

So, beginning next week, I will be exceedingly busy with work ‘n stuff. I will probably only be able to post rarely. If at all.

Since I won’t have time to really monitor the site, I’ve password protected some of my older, more personal posts. (The password is my middle name, a terrestrial-like moniker I share with my father.) Similarly, I’ve classified some of my Flickr images as private, a decision which removes them from my Photobook. I may or may not publish them again later in the summer.

That is all. Thanks for visiting my site.

My new computer. Specs: Dell Inspiron E1405, Intel® Core™ 2 Duo 1.66GHz (2MB Cache), 2GB RAM, 120GB Hard Drive, Windows Vista™ Home Premium. I was thinking about going Mac, but they’re pretty expensive.

1. Question: What is the difference between demure and demur?

   Answer: Demure means “reserved or modest.” Demur means to “delay” or “take exception to.”

2. You may have noticed that Google invested $3.9 million in Sergey Brin’s wife’s startup. Here was my comment on John Battelle’s blog:
   

   (I know—Wolfowitz’s.)

3. How much does open-heart surgery cost?

   Answer: A coronary bypass surgery costs somewhere in the range of $60,000. Source.

4. Can bullets fired into the air (during, say, a New Year’s celebration) fall back down and kill someone?

   Answer: Theoretically, but it’s exceedingly rare.

   Mythbusters actually devoted an entire episode to this topic. Here is how Wikipedia summarizes:

   In the case of a bullet fired at a precisely vertical angle (something extremely difficult for a human being to duplicate), the bullet would tumble, lose its spin, and fall at a much slower speed due to terminal velocity and is therefore rendered less than lethal on impact. However, if a bullet is fired upward at a non-vertical angle (a far more probable possibility), it will maintain its spin and will reach a high enough speed to be lethal on impact. Because of this potentiality, firing a gun into the air is illegal in most states, and even in the states that it is legal, it is not recommended by the police. Also the MythBusters were able to identify two people who had been injured by falling bullets, one of them fatally injured.

   For a more thorough discussion, see this Metafilter thread.

5. Via MGoBlog via the Onion. Headline: Ohio State Uses T-Shirt Blaster To Pass Out Diplomas. Classic.

   

6. I just have learned that a plural form of aquarium is aquaria. Stop the presses.

7. By the way, I’ve also just learned that unproportional isn’t a word. It’s disproportional. Carry on.

This post is the second in what I have hoped to be a weekly celebration of words (but has soon devolved into a desultory deliberation on diction). As always—super good.

The words below also come from a Paul Farmer book; today, it’s The Uses of Haiti. See a few quotes in the previous post.

(Note: definitions are paraphrased from the indispensable American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. [A vade mecum, perhaps?])

1. charnel house

   “In times of strife, when hospitals become charnel houses, the university has seemed bucolic; tygers are rare in the groves of acadame.”

   charnel house: a place where bones or bodies of the dead are deposited

2. withering

   “Thompson concludes his withering attack on the French philosopher Louis Althusser and other scholar-demagogues by accusing them of taking young men and women of good will on a ride: ‘The terminus of that ride is outside the city of human endeavor and outside the domain of knowledge. So we can expect them to be absent from both.’”

   withering: overwhelming, devastating

   (My note: apparently, wuthering, as in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, is a location not a word. Moving on.)

3. invective

   “Review of the historical record is nothing more than ’sound-bites and invectives about Washington’s historically evil foreign policy.’”

   invective: characterized by abusive language

4. plebiscite

   “Wilson’s Marines organized a plebiscite in which the Constitution was ratified by a 99.9% vote, with 5% of the population participating, using ‘rather high handed methods to get the Constitution adopted by the people of Haiti,’ the State Department conceded a decade later.”

   plebiscite: a direct vote in which the entire electorate is invited to accept or refuse a proposal

   (My note: the word plebe, which refers to a first-year student (or a cadet) at the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S. Naval Academy, immediately comes to mind. Plebe is probably short for plebeian, referring to the common people of Rome.)

5. Pyrrhic

   “But, as we shall see in the following chapters, this victory has been a Pyrrhic one.”

   Pyrrhic: a victory that is so costly it may not have been worth the effort

   (From Wikipedia: “The phrase is an allusion to King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties when he defeated the Romans during the Pyrrhic War at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC.”)

6. indemnity

   “As late as 1824, the French monarch Charles X pressed Haiti’s President, Jean-Pierre Boyer for 150 million francs and the halving of customs charges for the French trade—all as indemnity for the losses of the plantation owners [in Haiti's revolutionary war].”

   indemnity: compensation, reparation

   (By the way, I’m reminded of the words immunity and impunity, lexical choices which always have seemed to confuse me. Let’s go to the dictionary. Immunity is a legal term that means “exemption from legal prosecution.” Impunity means “exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm.” I guess the words are closely related, but immunity has move of a judicial connotation to it. [Now, I'm just as confused as ever.])

7. interregnum

   “Again, a troubled interregnum followed; again, the British, French, Spanish and North Americans vied for influence and control”

   interregnum: the interval of time between the end of a sovereign’s reign and the accession of a successor.

8. au courant

   “Such ‘reclamations’ were au courant in the German, French, British, and United States communities.”

   au courant: informed on political affairs

   (My note: apologies for the French. I won’t let it happen again. Also, foreign-language words, such as au courant, are generally italicized when used in English.)

9. intransigent

   “The widespread hope that Haiti could change radically had been dealt a telling blow by the intransigent CNG.”

   intransigent: uncompromising

   (Transigent, apparently, isn’t a word—although it should be. Intransient isn’t a word either, but transient means “passing with time.” I think.)

10. genteel

    “The bishops were unable to call for their genteel removal by the police . . .”

    genteel: polite, characteristic of the gentry (upper class)

    (My note: Unsurprisingly, the word has the same etymology as gentleman.)

Here are two of the most powerful quotes from Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti. This book isn’t so much an academic essay as it is a simmering diatribe against the developed world’s (and, especially, the U.S.’s) treatment of Haiti. The gist of Farmer’s impassioned argument is that Haiti has been systematically used by foreign powers, leading to a nation that is the clichéd “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” It’s not a feel-good story.

1. Question: How do former-friends-turned-ideological-enemies break the ice before a meeting?

   Answer: Just like everyone else. They tell Bush jokes.

   A North Korean general opened the proceedings of a South-Korean military meeting with the following laugher:

   Bush goes out jogging one morning and, preoccupied with international affairs, fails to notice that a car is heading straight at him.

   A group of schoolchildren pull the president away just in time, saving his life, and a grateful Bush offers them anything they want in the world as a reward.

   “We want a place reserved for us at Arlington Memorial Cemetery,” say the children.

   “Why is that?” asks Bush.

   “Because our parents will kill us if they find out what we’ve done.”

   Har, har, har. Very funny, Mr. General, although I’d like to point out that the same joke has been circulating on the internet since at least 2002. (Proof: this link takes you to a webpage archived on February 11, 2002. But perhaps the internet has just reached North Korea…)

2. As Ellen so kindly (and vexingly) pointed out, Natalie Portman and Norah Jones are co-starring in a new movie, My Blueberry Nights. Throw in that new girl from Grey’s Anatomy, and we’ll call it a flick.
   

3. Question: How much was Bill Clinton paid to deliver the University of Michigan’s 2007 commencement address? (Cue mandatory link to self here.)

   Answer: Perhaps aside from travel expenses, I think nothing.

   I do know that CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour spoke sans fee in 2006 (although she was given an honorary degree), that Middlebury roped Clinton into speaking for free at commencement this year, and that Clinton has not charged for previous graduation engagements in 2006 at Princeton, Tulane and Texas. I also know that Bloomberg has reported that the former president’s “graduation speeches are customarily given free of charge.” These reports, along with circumstantial, internet-esque (i.e., unreliable) evidence (see comments) here and here, lead me to believe Clinton spoke for free—especially as he has received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

   (Interestingly, Clinton could turn this this commencement business into quite the cottage industry. Bloomberg also reports that “Clinton earned $7.5 million for speaking 43 times in 2005, an average of $174,419 a speech.” No word yet as to if Clinton receives any health benefits in addition to speaker’s fees [a joke!].)

4. Opine-ing. From the University of Michigan’s very own Juan Cole:

   Remember that we’re all concerned, as we should be, about these events at Virginia Tech today. In Iraq this is a daily event. Imagine how horrible it would be if this kind of massacre were occurring every single day.

   —Professor Juan Cole, PBS Newshour, April 16, 2007

5. If any of my seven daily blog readers (no, seriously, that’s the actual number) had not noticed, Google released a brand-new engine to power its searches. Called “Universal Search,” the new algorithm will “blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.”

   This announcement is quite irrelevant except for the fact that the query “bill clinton michigan commencement” places (as of 5.18.07) my video third on Google’s PageRank. Weird. (Credit to Andrea, too.)

   

6. Grammar fun. Yay!.

   Question: When do you use anyway, anyways, and any way?

   Answer:

   EnglishPlus says “The compound word anyway is an adverb meaning regardless.” Any way is simply the word way modified by the word any. It means any manner or any method.”

   Now this brief commentary has been exciting and all, but what about one of the the black sheeps of prescriptive linguists—anyways?

   Well, our American Heritage Dictionary calls the word “Nonstandard. In any case.” In a usage note of the same dictionary, the AHD’s lexicographers say anyways “raises Standard users’ eyebrows nearly everywhere else [except the South] in all speech and is unacceptable in Edited English.” Even the ultimate reliability in scholarly work, Wiktionary, discourages the use of anyways in formal speech or writing. Ouch.

   To summarize, you should ignore the prohibitive conventions of English diction, take a stand against linguistic stricture, and utilize anyways as much as possible. Happy scribing, and super good.

The set of images I link to below are probably the single most powerful thing I’ve found on the internet. Renée Byer of The Sacramento Bee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for the photoset, which details “her intimate portrayal of a single mother and her young son as he loses his battle with cancer.” Heartbreaking.

I would also like to direct you to Derek’s Wish, a non-profit organization formed by the mother in these photographs. The charity was created to help families with a child or a single parent fighting terminal cancer with rent, utilities, and food assistance. Truly a noble cause.

Links:

Start here: Pulitzer-Prize website.

Other stuff to explore on the web:

Slideshow (1). Slideshow (2). Slideshow (3). Slideshow (4).

Video (1). Video (2). Video (3). Video (4).

Sac-Bee Pulitzer article. Derek’s Wish portal.

“Racing barefooted after kicking off her flip-flops, Cyndie pushes her son Derek Madsen, 10, up and down hallways in the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento on June 21, 2005, successfully distracting him during the dreaded wait before his bone marrow extraction. Doctors want to determine whether he is eligible for a blood stem cell transplant, his best hope for beating neuroblastoma, a rare childhood cancer, which was diagnosed in November 2004.”

Paul used to make these for me all the time. Payback. (See his comment here for circumstantial evidence.)

P.S. On another note, Paul’s taking the MCAT today. Wish him luck.

“See here, this graph is charting your coolness level, on the vertical axis, versus time t_n, on the horizontal axis. As you can see, your coolness reached its absolute maximum quite a ways back at t₁ = too long ago to remember. Since then, it looks like the graph has been going down in a pretty linear fashion…”

This post is the first in what I hope to be a weekly celebration of words (but will more likely devolve into a desultory deliberation on diction). As always—super good.

The words here come from Paul Farmer’s dissertation-turned-book, AIDS and Accusation. I quote from it in the post below. For more information on the book—and a terrific review by Amazon.com customer sebastiand—click here.

(Note: definitions are paraphrased from the indispensable American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. [A vade mecum, perhaps?])

1. nascent

   “I certainly take no pleasure in pointing out that a geographically broad and historically deep examination of the nascent pandemic in the 1980s showed that this disaster would occur unless vigorous and fundamentally structural interventions took place.”

   nascent: coming to existence; emergent

2. provenance

   “My rebuttal to this frequently encountered view about the provenance of HIV, which is informed by clinical and historical evidence, may come as unwelcome news to some.”

   provenance: place of origin

   (My note: compare with providence [a deity] and province [a division of a country].)

3. quietus

   “At the conference, several Haitian clinicians presented case material that put the quietus on any doubts whether or not the syndrome seen in Haiti was the same as that encountered in the urban United States.”

   quietus: something that serves to suppress, check, or eliminate

4. idyllic

   “Harvests were, by all reports, bountiful; life there is now recalled as idyllic.”

   idyllic: simple and carefree

   (My note: an idyll is a short poem “written . . . in the style of Theocritus’s short pastoral poems, the Idylls [source: Wiktionary].)

5. efflorescence

   “The efflorescence of new services drew many families to the area, which had previously been considered an exceedingly inhospitable place.”

   efflorescence: flowering, anthesis

6. maleficence

   “Of the dozen or so villagers interviewed about Marie’s illness, only one spoke as if there was (past subjunctive sic) even a chance that she had been the victim of maleficience.”

   maleficence: the doing of evil

   (My note: compare with the law terms against the holders of public office—malfeasance [illegal conduct by a public official], misfeasance [the performance of a lawful action in an illegal or improper manner], and nonfeasance [failure to do what ought to be done].)

7. jacqueries

   “The record is replete with accounts of jacqueries and peasant movements, local revolts, and organized resistance.”

   jacquerie: a peasant revolt

   (From Wikipedia: “The Jacquerie was a popular revolt in late medieval Europe that took place in northern France in 1358, during the Hundred Years’ War. The revolt centered in the Oise valley north of Paris. This rebellion was known as the Jacquerie after its peasant revolutionary leader Guillaume Cale, popularly known as Jacques Bonhomme (“Jack Goodfellow”) or Callet. The word “Jacquerie” later became a synonym for French peasant uprisings.”)

8. consanguinity

   “Of the 123 families then living in Do Kay, 56 had kin in the urban area, and 14 families could claim consanguinity with Haitians living in the United States.”

   consanguinity: from the same lineage of another person

   (My note: think of sanguine, the color of blood.)

9. putative

   “Was the putative sorcery related to the beating?”

   putative: purported; supposed, reputed

   (The word appears to have a vageuly negative connotation—as in a claim believed to be true on inconclusive grounds. Also, compare with punitive [relating to punishment].)

10. insolent

    “Everyone was, however, shaken and revolted that, to quote Pére Alexis, “the goverment would insolently parade its victims before us.”

    insolent: arrogant; disrespectful

    (For some reason, I thought it meant stubborn. Also, compare the word insolent to insolvent [being unable to meet debts] and indolent [lazy]. For interesting [at least to me] information on my previous use of different from as opposed to different than, see the AHD’s pedantic Usage Note here.)