Places

Nicked from Jen and brought to you by the power of boredom.

List the towns or cities where you spent at least a night away from home during 2007. Mark with a star if you had multiple non-consecutive stays.

In alphabetical order:

• Aberdeen, Scotland.


• Armbouts-Cappel, dép. Nord, France.


• Athens, Greece, at Eleftherios Venizelos Airport.


• Bergen, Norway.


• Den Haag, Netherlands. *


• Kalloni, Lesbos, Greece.


• London, England, near Heathrow Airport.


• Montréal, Québec, Canada.


• Westerbork, Netherlands. *

Next year promises to be less exciting, what with finishing the PhD and only going to a conference in Amsterdam.

Points of view

Commas
A while ago I had a discussion with M. about the copy-editing skills of the Scotsman editors. They are quite happy to fiddle with her column, and they appear to have some interesting ideas about where commas go. For example, if M. would write a sentence

1. This is an interesting argument, but the conclusions are mistaken.

this is likely to end up in print as

2. This is an interesting argument but, the conclusions are mistaken.

We both agreed that they did it wrong, but it took a while to agree on why they were wrong and what would be right. Or rather, until we found out that we had the same ideas all along, just different ideas of how to express them.

We agreed that in sentence 1, the comma is before but. In sentence 2, the comma is after but. Unfortunately, we didn't start the discussion with temporal prepositions, but with locative ones – and there we disagreed. I said that in sentence 1, the comma was in front of but, and in sentence 2 it was behind but, but M. thought it was exactly the other way around.

She explained that she sees words as little people that face in the direction you're reading, so their backs are towards what you've already read, and their fronts are towards what you've yet to read. Therefore, in sentence 1, the comma is near what you've already read – behind but. In my point of view (and, to be honest, in the point of view of all others I have discussed this with) the front of the word is the beginning of the word, the first letter of the word, so that comma in sentence 1 is near the front of the word.

Could be an interesting psycholinguistics research topic, especially when comparing this to people who are used to reading right-to-left writing like Arabic or Hebrew. (M. claimed having to learn some Hebrew when she was younger might have changed her perceptions of fronts and backs of words.)


Tellies
Why is it

I am sitting behind my desk (working).
I am sitting behind my computer (typing).
I am sitting behind my piano (playing).
I am standing behind the cooker (cooking).

but

I am sitting in front of t' telly (watching a movie).

Or at least in Dutch – ik zit achter mijn bureau, de computer, de piano; ik sta achter het fornuis, het aanrecht but ik zit voor de televisie.

Could this also have something to do with perspectives? If you imagine an old-fashioned director's office with a big mahogany desk in the middle of the room, the director would sit behind the desk from the point of view of the modest office clerk entering the majestic hall. At least this is what I imagine is what lies behind people standing behind the bar: it's from the perspective of the punters.

Or is it something with activity and passivity? All the ones where you're behind something are active. You're actively working, you're actively typing, playing the piano, preparing food. Except when you're vegging out in front of the television, and that's a rather passive activity. Is it the passivity, or just the analogy with televisions, that makes it possible to say

I am sitting in front of the computer watching a DVD.

Is it possible to say that?

Also, is there a difference between standing in front of the door and standing behind the door? It seems to me that someone who's standing in front of the door has just rung the doorbell and is waiting to be let in (passive), while someone who's behind the door is possibly hiding, waiting to surprise you or whatever, but is capable of coming in of their own accord (active).

And while we're on the subject of front doors... If I'm inside the house, someone who has just rung the doorbell is standing in front of the door while the box of candy for trick-or-treat is standing behind the door. From my perspective, this is wrong. Still, I think it's right.

Why strive?

Bas Haring, Voor een echt succesvol leven.

I thought Bas Haring was a philosopher, but it turns out he did Artificial Intelligence, and now he's a professor in Leiden, doing ‘public understanding of science’. I also thought Bas Haring was witty and not necessarily unpleasant to look at, and I'm fortunately still right about that.

This book For real successful living is about our ambitions, why they are what they are (and not something else), and why they are there in the first place. Why do we strive to be the best in something, the biggest, the strongest, the highest, the fastest? Well, if the winner of a race was the person who ran the 10K slowest, everyone would just stand still and there would be no winner. If you would get prestige by building a very small tower next to your house, no one would build a tower at all and everyone would have the same prestige.

Why would you need to compete in the first place, is another question, I suppose. But that's the question of natural selection and Darwinism and suchlike, which is obvious in the book when he talks about crabs and ducks and other animals. For those who subscribe to Intelligent Design, there may be no reason to compete in the first place? So stop annoying the rest of us?

The two main things to learn from this book:

• There's no point in saying something is better than something else. You always need to see it's better as what or for whom.


• Things that are good for the continuation of the species need not be good for the individual.

That is a crap summary. Just read the book. It's a good book for making you think.

Purchases

Music:

• Simeon ten Holt, Canto Ostinato;


• Edvard Grieg, Peer Gynt Suites 1&2 - Fra Holbergs tid - Sigurd Jorsalfar;


• Fixkes, Fixkes.

Books:

• Simon Vestdijk, Ierse nachten;


• Luc Devoldere et al. (eds)., Overeind in Babel: talen in Europa.


• Floris Cohen, De herschepping van de wereld: het onstaan van de moderne natuurwetenschap verklaard.

On the list, but as yet unbought because buying English-language books in the Netherlands is stupid as they are cheaper in Scotland anyway, especially with the pound doing so poorly against the euro currently...

• Graham Burnett, Trying Leviathan: the nineteenth-century New York court case that put the whale on trial and challenged the order of nature;


• Alexander McCall Smith, The careful use of compliments.

More bookblog impending, by the way, as soon as I finish the book...

A bit of language log

I have the annoying tendency to pick up on strange things I say or hear, then make a note on it and try to figure out what's actually going on, or what's actually going wrong. I'm talking constructions here, not necessarily the content of the examples. The examples are taken from actual conversation, which does give a little insight in my life – which after all is what a blog is for...

One
From a discussion with M., when she was talking about the difficulties keeping food warm that she was going to make at a friend's house. I meant A, but I said B.

A. Put them in whatever the woman's name is's bed.
B. Put them in whatever the woman's name's bed is.

I think this is just a production error, caused by a slightly too heavy NP (CP?) whatever the woman's name is. Maybe there is a limit to the size of the NP that can take a possessive 's; this NP was too big and things went wrong.

Two
From radio football commentary.

...maar daarna is NEC beter, gedurfder, meer risico gaan nemend gaan voetballen

Possibly another production error, pre-empting the gaan from the main clause VP.

Three
From a game of Trivial Pursuit.

Q. Wat doet men als men een vallende ster ziet?

A1. Een wens.
A2. Een wens doen.

Possibly a case of do support, but more likely a case of a mix up between lexical doen and dummy verb doen.

Four
From a rant by Hans Lebbis on television yesterday.

Dokter Phil moet dood.

This reminded me of the Scots The dishes need done, but it's not X needs V'ed, but X needs A, meaning X needs ?(to be) made A.

Now just to figure out what's actually going on. But I'm too lazy for that, and have other things to do.

I'm speaking foreign (revisited)*

In the cd shop today, upon purchasing (among other things) the cd Canto Ostinato – over an hour of very repetitive contemporary classical music, which is very entrancing – I had the following conversation with the person behind the sales counter:

Him: Ja, die is net onlangs opnieuw uitgebracht.
Me: O, is-tie?

Another one for the collection of English things I say in Dutch.

* The original (draft) title for this post was tag questions, but I'm not sure this qualifies as one.

Nationalities (revisited)

After a previous post about fluid notions of nationality in professional cycling, here's another example from (inter)national top sport. The television commentary on Lornah Kiplagat's world championship cross-country running, earlier this year in Mombasa, Kenya:

Kiplagat heeft het waargemaakt in eigen land. Wereldkampioene op de lange cross. Wat een fantastische prestatie van deze Nederlandse.

Kiplagat did not become (Dutch) sportswoman of the year 2007.

Notes of mystery

Because I am foreseeing lots of marking this week, I'm not really starting any big projects. This is the perfect time to tidy my desk, put stuff in the appropriate files (or the waste-paper bin) and generally get a bit more organized.

And then I find a piece of paper which I think – from the notes on it – dates from about September 2006. On the note is a mysterious sequence of abbreviations:

BS
IS

CB
DC
DPlay

BH
IH
BC
IC
C.

I have no idea what I meant by this. I'm chucking out the note because it's now useless. If I ever get a brainwave and think, ‘I wrote down ten abbreviations on a piece of paper that had to do with this’, this blog post will have saved them for posterity...

More Computing Services

There is more to tell, which I will do over the next week when I do not foresee a whole load of useful work to be done apart from marking EL1 exams, from which I will probably take a couple of breaks which I can then use for blogging. In the mean time, another gem from Computing Services, stressing once again that unavailability of systems is their primary goal:

Problem with access to WebCT - MALTS

We are experiencing problems with users being able to log into WebCT at present. We are investigating and will rectify the problem as soon as possible.

Users being able to log on to WebCT. Well, we can't have that, surely...

Computing Services work ethic

This morning I thought I'd check whether any of my first years had posted any panicky questions to the forum on WebCT. Unfortunately, the MyEd portal was down, with some services working, and others (among them WebCT) not. They provided a link to the homepage of the Information Services Applications Division, where I could find more information.

Not really.

But they did have a news article:

Infrastructure unplanned availability remains above 99.5% generally.

All services other than eFinancials (which experienced a weekend outage in October) are showing greater than 99.9% availability so far this year.

Surely what they mean is that unplanned unavailability remains below 0.5% (or rather 0.1%) generally, but got themselves in a bit of a knot when they tried to give a positive twist to the story. Now it seems like the availability of IT services at the university is a complete fluke, and that Computing Services had nothing to do with it. At least they never planned for this to happen. Of course, with the Computing Services' track record, this is entirely possible.

Also, it's a bit fishy and number-juggly to boast about your achievements (or chance's achievements, for that matter) and exclude the things that didn't work. That's like saying (the former) Yugoslavia is a very peaceful area, if you only ignore the gazillion wars they've fought down there.

New money

The Bank of Scotland (one of three banks in Scotland that issue paper money) issued a new series of banknotes on 17 September, and it wasn't until last Thursday that I finally managed to get new money out of the cash machine.

I like them.

Most people find them very similar to the euro banknotes. This may well be because the previous series of Bank of Scotland banknotes (as well as the current series of Royal Bank of Scotland notes, Bank of England notes, and in particular Clydesdale Bank notes) looked like it was printed in Poland in 1934, and the design finally looks like it may have been done this century. Apart from British money, the only money people here know are US dollars (which look even shiter), and euros. So I think the main reason why people think the new notes look like euros is that they look modern.

The other euro-like feature is that the design is based on bridges. But whereas euro notes feature imaginary bridges that exist only in the brain of Robert Kalina, the bridges on the new Scottish notes are real. The £10 note I have features Glenfinnan Viaduct. The one major design flaw I could spot was that it does in fact say this, in what I estimate to be a 36-point font, whereas the text Ten Pounds is only in about a 14-point font. (The reverse/front has a picture of Sir Walter Scott. Here they do have Ten Pounds in 36 points, and Sir Walter Scott in approximately 6 points.)

The Glenfinnan Viaduct, by the way, is on the way to Fort William. It apparently appears in three Harry Potter movies, notably The Chamber of Secrets where there is a whole scene of the Hogwarts Express crossing the viaduct.

But comparing the £10 note to other countries' banknotes, I find them quite similar to the 8th series of Swiss banknotes, designed by Jörgen Zintzmeyer. I find these really clever, both because of the upright rather than oblong design, and because all banknotes are equally wide but incrementally taller as the denomination increases. This goes in steps of 11 mm, and exactly the top 11 mm of each banknote includes a specifically coloured bar, the denomination, and the Swiss cross. Genius.

The Swiss are planning on changing their banknotes again, but the current plans are not necessarily an improvement.

Also, with the new Bank of Scotland design, I am now preferring their banknotes over all the others, where I previously liked the Royal Bank designs best. Clydesdale designs still suck, and I can only hope they'll get their act together and introduce something new soon...

SUSCDF 2007

This Saturday was SUSCDF, conveniently in Edinburgh. I had been part looking forward to it – as I do to most dances on the university programme, because that means seeing all those nice people that you don't get too see very often – and part dreading it. The dread was because of the dem, which I have previously said shall not be mentioned. Much.

The dem went better than expected, and probably as well as could optimistically be expected given the choreography and the music we were supposed to do it to. Glasgow had a traditional-type dem like we normally do, Celtic did the same Variations on a Theme-type dem that they always do, and Aberdeen have now managed to get seven couples in a Schiehallion reel, with eight planned for SUSCDF 2008.

Dance-wise, I don't think I've done as many dances off a programme as I did this Saturday for a long time. I only missed the two on either side of our dem, and I sat out Purple Heather Jig, as I do not understand, comprehend, grasp nor get any colour of Heather Jig. I think we raised some eyebrows when Johann asked me to waltz with him. Apparently he's wanting to improve his waltzing as a lady. (Scary images of Little Britain happening now.) I also danced with Bobby until he managed to rip a scab off his hand and started bleeding like a pig,* so I replaced him with Andy.** And I danced with Zsofia, Anna, Jen, Heather, Liz, Jenni, Holly, Jessie, Kirsty F.,*** Fran, Kirsty F.,**** Cara, Sarah, Jenni, Erika (those five in Caddam Wood, so they don't really count), Rosie, Kirsty F. again,***** and Emma.

* In Dutch you bleed like an ox, which sounds less pejorative, if only marginally so.
** What are Celtic doing right that we aren't?
*** Originally Edinburgh, now St Andrews.
**** Originally Newcastle, now Aberdeen.
***** As ****.******
****** Not the best system, these asterisks. I may have to look into using superscript, or be all old-fashioned about it. From Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style: "For footnotes, symbols can be used if the notes are few. (The traditional order is * † ‡  || ¶. But beyond the asterisk, dagger and double dagger, this order is not familiar to most readers, and never was.) Numbers are more transparent, and their order is much less easy to confuse." Good to know Bringhurst doesn't trust all readers not to confuse the order of numbers...

The after dance party was slightly hard work. As soon as I got there I decided that it had probably been a bad plan to go, but then inertia took over and I didn't leave until quite a while later, and I was home and in bed by 3am.