Micah Tillman

I notice this every time I have to grade an exam (as I was just doing earlier this week).

The issue is whether ampersands point to the right or left.

The answer is that ampersands point right.  They are Es, not 3s.

This is because the ampersand is just shorthand for “Et,” which is the Latin/French word for “and.”

Why, then, does the ampersand on your keyboard look like “&”?  It’s just another way of writing “Et” (using one continuous stroke instead of two).

So, when you’re trying to remember which way the ampersand goes, just ask yourself, “Am I writing a 3 or an E?”

And if you can’t remember that, just ask yourself, “Am I writing a number or a letter?” (or, “Am I writing a numeral or a word?” — or something like that).

Tags: Ampersand

The Wife, and the Sister-in-Law, and I went to see the Marinsky Opera’s version of Prokofiev’s operatic adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace yesterday at the government-run Kennedy Center yesterday.

It was very good.  The staging was marvelous, the music was wonderful (I like Prokofiev, evidently), and it was cool to hear so much Russian — it was performed entirely in Russian by real live Russians, and there were lots of Russian-speaking attendees there (some sitting right behind us).

The opera, written by Prokofiev in the early 1940s, makes you proud to be a Russian.  Russia is repeatedly referred to as “sacred,” “holy,” and “mother.”  The singers insist over and over again upon their devotion to Russia, and upon the glory of Russia.

It is, in short, heavy on Russian/Russo-Centric patriotic propaganda.

This was especially interesting in light of the fact that the Kennedy Center is a US government-created and -run institution.  Its Board of Trustees has 36 “Members Appointed by the President of the United States” (including such notables as Norman Mineta and Condoleezza Rice) and 22 “Members Ex Officio Designated by Act of Congress” (including such notables as Sec. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sec. Kathleen Sebelius, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Sen. Barbara Boxer, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. John Boehner, and DC Mayor Adrian Fenty).

So, it was both a great experience, and a little ironic.

Tags: Kennedy Center, Marinsky Opera, Prokofiev, Tolstoy, War and Peace

On Communion Sundays we at our church seem to frequently sing “Put Peace Into Each Other’s Hands.”

The melody/arrangement is gorgeous, but the lyrics are hysterical.

For instance, in the third verse, everyone sings dramatically:

Look people warmly in the eye

Really?

“Look people warmly in the eye?”

Okay . . . .

____

But the last verse is the kicker.  Here’s how it ends:

In love make peace, give peace a chance and share it like a treasure.

That’s right.

John Lennon.

In a hymn.

____

What’s perhaps worse is the “In love make peace” line.

Why does that sound familiar?

Well, the opposite of making war is making peace, right?

No, I seem to remember something from the Lennon era about the opposite of making peace being . . . .

____

Oh.

“In love, make peace”

Switch “peace” with “love.”

That’s why it sounds familiar.

____

It’s impossible to sing the hymn with a straight face.

And then, out of the blue, Tillman started talking about colors.

I’ve been grading tests and papers now for two weeks straight.  And when that happens, the need to write eventually builds up to the point where I have to take a break and write something.

So, I was thinking about how weird it is that translation is possible.  You can say basically the same thing in two different languages.  That’s weird.

Maybe it’s evidence of some “universal grammar,” or maybe it’s evidence that the world simply has certain structures that people in every language have noticed and want to talk about.

Anyway, somehow that got me thinking about the names for colors in various languages, and whether other languages distinguish between the colors that English distinguishes between.

And then that reminded me of “Roy G. Biv,” perhaps the dumbest thing any human has ever come up with.  First off, “Biv” isn’t a name.  Second off, “Roy G. Biv” doesn’t follow its own pattern.

So, Roy G. Biv is the following, right?

Red – Orange — Yellow – Green — Blue – Indigo — Violet

Look at the pattern.

The bolded names stand for the primary colors.

The colors between are produced (in paint, at least), by mixing the two primary colors to their left and right.

So, Orange is a mixture of Red (to its left) and Yellow (to its right).  Green is a mixture of Yellow (to its left) and Blue (to its right).

The next color after Blue should be the mixture of Blue (to its left) and Red (to its right, since colors go in circles).

Red Orange Yellow Green Blue ????? Red Orange Yellow . . .

And what is a mixture of Blue and Red?

Purple.

That’s right.

Thank you.

Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Purple Red Orange Yellow . . .

It’s not “Roy G. Biv,” It’s “Roy G. Bp.”  Which spells nothing.

Which just goes to show you that Roy G. Biv was a stupid idea in the first place, because the only way it works is if they lie to you about how many colors are between Blue and Red (following the same pattern as you followed when talking about the colors between Red and Yellow, and between Yellow and Blue).

So there.  Take that, whoever invented Roy G. Biv.

Tags: Colors, Roy G. Biv

So, to prove that I hadn’t just made up the Bizarre Ontology — but rather that it was something that people actually believe — I used the “frontispiece” from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.

Now, I would like to use Hobbes’ main philosophical rival, John Locke.

Locke writes (Second Treatise, Section 145):

For though in a commonwealth the members of it are distinct persons, still, in reference to one another, and, as such, are governed by the laws of the society, yet, in reference to the rest of mankind, they make one body, which is, as every member of it before was, still in the state of Nature with the rest of mankind, so that the controversies that happen between any man of the society with those that are out of it are managed by the public, and an injury done to a member of their body engages the whole in the reparation of it.  So that under this consideration the whole community is one body in the state of Nature in respect of all other states or persons out of its community.

See what I mean?  They all form “one body,” and if you injure one member of the body, “the whole” body has to get involved to repair the damage?

I love Locke’s Second Treatise.  But I do not love its “body” metaphors.

Tags: Bizarre Ontology, John Locke

You may know that I periodically get on Drudge’s case for the fact that the adverts on his site often don’t display correctly (which leads me to wonder why companies pay him to advertise on his site).

Today, I found the following juxtaposition of headlines ironic:

The links are to the following stories: Alabama shooting / Palin mania

It reminds me of the Focus on the Family/Tebow Family Superbowl Ad following the Snickers/Betty White Ad.  Both football-themed.  Both involving women getting tackled.

The Betty White/Snickers Ad was funny, I thought.  I love Betty White.

But then to have it followed immediately — at least here in the DC Metro Area — by the FOTF/Tebow Ad meant the idea of a young guy tackling an older woman no longer had the ludicrousness that might have made it funny — especially because Pam Tebow is nowhere near as old as Betty White.

You went from the absolute ludicrousness of a frail elderly woman playing football with a bunch of twenty-somethings, to the somewhat milder ludicrousness of a tough 40s-ish mom roughhousing with her twenty-something football-playing son.

And thus the point that the FOTF Ad was trying to make — that Pam Tebow is so strong she not only could stand up for her son when people were telling her to abort him, but can still hold her own with him in playful combat today — got lost.

(Perhaps companies should not only pay for advertising, but pay for context?  Maybe they already do?)

Tags: Ad, Drudge, Focus on the Family, Sarah Palin, Snickers, Superbowl, Tebow

Canada = United States + Nice

Tags: Canada, Olympics, Vancouver

Okay, so it’s the morning after, and I was amused (perhaps I shouldn’t have been) to see this out the window:

You will, of course, recognize the car parked across the street.  The SUV “behind” it, is now on the side of the road.  They got it to slide/lurch into that position.  It was pretty amazing to watch.

Then, last night, the white car got stuck coming down the hill, and this morning, the silver car (which seems to have a ticket under one of its windshield wipers) and the taxi had been added to the “pile up.”

That’s a brave Maintenance/Grounds Crew Member with a snowblower/machine/thing in the lower right-hand corner of the shot, if you’re wondering.

And here’s a picture of our car:

*sigh*

Tags: Snowpocalypse

Looking up the hill:

^{See the car across the road in the lower right-hand corner?}

____

There’s no getting down the hill:

^{Four guys tried and tried and tried and tried to get the car unstuck.}

____

Here’s what you would get to if you could get past the car (which you couldn’t):

^{A wasteland.}

____

Strangely enough, some people want to be out in this:

^{These two guys don’t seem to be out for the same reason, since the guy behind disappeared relatively quickly, while the guy in front kept walking.}

____

A local photographer had also left her/his building, further up the street, and begun filming/taking pictures:

^{The guy walking up the hill, and the photographer walking down, meet in the middle.}

____

The photographer has discovered new photographic quarry!

^{“What? You don’t want your picture taken?”}

____

The photographer had put her/his camera away/shut it down, and now gets it back out/turns it back on:

^{“You cannot escape!”}

____

I think she/he begins to film here:

^{“I call this one, ‘Man in Blizzard’ . . . “}

____

I’m pretty sure she/he has started filming by now:

^{“. . . It’s my celebration of human triumph over adversity.”}

____

But the photographer will never know that she/he was the one being photographed.

^{I call this one, “Going ‘Meta’ in a Blizzard.”}

____

Later, someone tried to drive down the hill for some reason, got out of his SUV, and walked away:

^{Your guess is as good as mine.}

____

Returning with a shovel, our stranded motorist begins his futile task, while another motorist up the hill has gotten him/herself into a similar situation:

^{I hope you own stock in towing companies.}

. . . four hours late.

No one could go to work today, because Snowpocalypse 2: Snoverkill was going to start at noon.

But it didn’t.

Sound familiar?

Tags: Snowpocalypse