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
Writebacks (0)
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
Writebacks (3)
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
Writebacks (3)
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
Writebacks (0)