On a happier dance note, it's very good to be dancing again. It's nice to do something that's physically demanding (especially as my job makes me more sedentary than ever before), and to be working on something that involves more than my brain and typing. And of course, it's good quality time with a certain special someone.

And as an added bonus, I can stay fit between my weekly lessons with a completely different type of dance: DDR is up and running! (After many adapter-related headaches; the short version is LevelSix good, RedOctane bad.)

So, after a year of near-groovelessness, I'm once again a dancing machine.

Category: Life

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I love dancing. I love actually doing it, and, as a general rule, I love watching it. But what I absolutely can't stand is watching people dance when they have no apparent interest in dancing. I'm not talking about the guy whose girlfriend dragged him to a dance lesson; I'm talking about people who dance competitively or in performances, but look bored... or worse, totally emotionless. Why are you there? Why are you forcing innocent people to watch you "dance"? We have even less interest in watching you than you appear to have in dancing, if such a thing is possible. This is why I've disliked every Argentine Tango demonstration I've seen. All the people I've seen seem to think that it's good to look bored and/or asleep while dancing it.

So for everyone's sake, learn to enjoy dancing—if you can't bear dance, we can't bear to watch. If that's too much to ask, then for crying out load, at least plaster a semi-realistic expression of some kind on your face. If you can learn complicated step, surely you can at least try to have an attitude of some kind.

And no, swishing your skirt (ladies) or wearing a loud shirt (gentlemen), does not magically give you attitude. The shirt just makes you look stupid.

Category: A & E

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Overheard outside of the "English for Engineers" class, while people were waiting for it to start, presumably discussing the about-to-be-turned-in draft of a group paper: "I just made a few semantic changes, to make the sentences flow better"" Apparently, altering the fundamental meaning of sentences is fine, so long as you sound good when you are done.

'Semantic' is right up there with 'ironic' as one of the most poorly used words in the English language. It's really much worse though, because while ironic has only expanded to include a lot more than it originally meant, semantic is used almost exclusively as the exact opposite of its actual meaning—in fact, if people knew they were doing it, they would be being ironic (but that in itself is not ironic, it's just kind of funny).

Of course, it's almost certainly the fault of the phrase "arguing semantics", which is a phrase that almost no-one who uses it actually understands. Being curious about language, I often wonder how thing like that happen. All I can think is that it was used to dismiss people who were trying to twist things by claiming that some word or another didn't really stand for its obvious meaning. So, if I say "I like blue better than red", and you say, "Yes, but what do you mean by blue? Do you prefer the shorter wavelength of the light? Do you like things that absorb blue light better, or things that reflect blue light?" then you are just arguing semantics; you are arguing about the meaning of the word blue, when you know full well that all I'm saying is that, given the choice between a blue shirt and a red shirt, I'll take the blue one.

But of course, people just hear it used dismissively, so they infer that it means arguing about things that aren't important, and then assume that semantics are the piddly details that don't matter. And so, as a result, many people think that syntax and semantics are the same thing, instead of fundamental opposites.

But, since it is used incorrectly so often, the issue of how it should be used is, in the end, a moot point

Category: Language

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Watching my referrer logs, I feel sort of guilty about blogging, or at least about having my blog indexed by search engines. Except for the handful of you who read regularly (props to you all), the people who end up here are usually doing searches for stuff that has nothing to do with anything I've ever written about. At first I didn't understand why they were showing up, as they were often quite elaborate queries which, in a world that made sense, would never have led them to my blog.

After some investigating I discovered that it's really the fact that weblogs (or at least how they are presented on web pages) are in many ways totally alien to how many people (including me) expect content to be. For example, if I do a search for the words "tree", "explore", "discrete", and "artificial intelligence", I would expect to get pages that relate somewhat to my research. Why? Because I expect pages of content to be somewhat consistent, since that's the way most content works in the Real World™ of web pages. So I assume that if someone manages to use all those words, there's a high probability that they are talking about applying research in tree-based discrete-space exploration to artificial intelligence problems.

In reality, I am relatively likely to get an archive of a month's worth of weblog entries on some random person's site, including a narrative about a hike through a new section of woods in their favorite park, a rant about how much they hated the movie "AI", and a story about telling an embarrassing secret to someone who turned out not to be trustworthy.

I think the ultimate solution would be to have an HTML division marker that was recognized by most search engines (by which I mean Google) as signaling a fundamental shift in content. Weblogs, and weblog archives, could insert it between each post, and the search engine could index each section as if it were a separate page (just one which happens to share a URL with other pages), so all the words would have to occur within one post in order for the page to be returned. It would help immensely, and it would be instantly adopted by many if the major blogging services and software turned it on by default.

Hopefully, GoogleBot is still reading avidly and it can incorporate my ideas into its programming. Until then, I'll watch people hitting my archive based on totally random queries.

If you are here because you wanted info on 'searching for alien intelligence in space', you've come to the wrong place. Next time, read the context preview Google gives you!

Category: Geek

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