Archive for re-post
Whining
Back in 2013 I wrote:
Unless they mean it humorously, when people utter this phrase – “but I’m not complaining” – they are *always* complaining; i.e., they are expressing “pain, grief, or discontent.” What these sad and/or irritated individuals mean to say is this: “But I’m not whining.” That is, they are not complaining in a petulant, feeble, long-lasting, or high-pitched manner. Nonetheless, they *are* whining, usually, despite their protests of innocence, aren’t they?
I felt I needed to come up with a formula to get my insight across: “If you complain about the same thing three times in a row, no other significant topic intervening, then you are in fact whining.”
With the pandemic, it has become almost impossible to interrupt one’s complaints with other topics. For example, my partner lives in the United States and we can’t cross the border to see one another. The “pain” and “discontent,” if not the “grief,” is continual. On the few occasions I am not talking about it, others are asking me about it.
So therefore, a new formula: Whining = just fine.
“Intimate supervision”: Surveillance on campus
This Washington Post report – holy crap:
Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health. …
Instead of GPS coordinates, the schools rely on networks of Bluetooth transmitters and wireless access points to piece together students’ movements from dorm to desk. One company that uses school WiFi networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data points per student every day.
School and company officials call location monitoring a powerful booster for student success: If they know more about where students are going, they argue, they can intervene before problems arise. But some schools go even further, using systems that calculate personalized “risk scores” based on factors such as whether the student is going to the library enough.
The dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed.
cross-posted from nocontest.ca
h/t Clarissa
Simpleness
My recipe for making people happy:
- Tell parents that their infant is beautiful.
- Tell neighbours that their dog is beautiful.
- Tell children that their bikes are fantastic.
Facebook friends append some ingredients to my recipe:
- “Little kids also like to know that you love their sneakers.” (thanks to S.M.)
- “Also, tell them their lemonade is good. Buy a second cup.” (thanks to @bfwriter)
My prodigal URL
When I moved to Vancouver in 1996, I became a communications specialist for public and private companies mostly headquartered in this city. I wrote management discussions for annual and quarterly reports, literally hundreds of news releases, and lots of material for online audiences in chatrooms on Usenet and elsewhere. With a couple of partners, I also created two or three dozen websites for clients; these were among the first in their industries.
Part of the fun of these latter projects was registering not just appropriate domain names for these companies, but other URLs that *might* be appropriate for them one day. On top of that, we made sure to register domain names that could possibly be confused for those our clients used, so that their competitors couldn’t get ahold of them for the purpose of confounding investors and regulators.
I thus spent a fair amount of capital collecting URLs, mostly for clients and potential clients but also for many for my own endeavours. This week I learned that I almost lost one – PigeonPark.net (used for various literary projects) – that I have had for 15 or so years. (Its expiration notice landed in my spam folder – yikes!) With the help of my friends at Uniserve Communications (which hosts most of my websites), I saved it in the nick of time – whew!
Here’s a blast from the past, from when I first announced the site on basil.CA:
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16 August 03: In You Don’t Look 35, Charlie Brown! the late Charles M. Schultz writes, “There must be different kinds of loneliness, or at least different degrees of loneliness. … The most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood only by a few. I compare the panic in this kind of loneliness to the dog we see running frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in his limited understanding, he is being left alone forever, and he has to run and run to survive. It is no wonder that we make terrible choices in our lives to avoid loneliness.”
Comix artist Seth illustrates these words in a remarkable series of panels called “Good Grief!” published in Drawn and Quarterly (Volume 2, Number 4). I came across these panels many years ago and have been looking for them ever since, locating them in my disorganized files only this morning. I now realize that my Pigeon Park Sentences were variations on Schultz’s theme, that I could not have even started without its echo in my imagination.
“It is no wonder that we make terrible choices in our lives to avoid loneliness.”
If you can’t exaggerate …
The renowned and divisive Hungarian-American physicist Edward Teller would tell this little story about an exchange he had with the great Niels Bohr:
Some of us, including Bohr, were having a discussion about the spectrum and states of molecular oxygen. Bohr had some opinions, the details of which I have now forgotten, but which were in obvious conflict with the facts that were known. In this special detailed case, I knew the situation and tried to explain it. Unfortunately I could not do so to Bohr’s satisfaction.
He began his objection: “Teller, of course, knows a hundred times more about this than I.” With a lack of politeness occasionally seen among twenty-year-olds, I interrupted (with some difficulty): “That is an exaggeration.”
Bohr instantly stopped and stared at me. After a pause, he declared, “Teller says I am exaggerating. Teller does not want me to exaggerate. If I cannot exaggerate, I cannot talk. All right. You are right, Teller. You know only ninety-nine times more than I do.” He then proceeded with his original argument having dispensed with any possibility of further interruption.
I have never forgotten, nor have I often neglected to mention, Bohr’s wisdom: *If you cannot exaggerate, you cannot talk.*
This is one of my favourite stories. (I’m with Bohr, surprise.)
- from Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, edited by A. P. French and P. J. Kennedy, Harvard U. Press, 1985.
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