Quick Roundup 80

Borg Culture

From the Star Trek wiki:

The Borg have no culture in the traditional sense of the word. Their sole purpose was the assimilation of other beings in their pursuit of perfection. Being a Collective, members lose any sense of individuality. The moment someone was assimilated his or her individuality was integrated within the Borg hive mind and they would be a part of the Borg Collective.

This is all I will have to say about Moslems and their unending assimilation attempts today.

And if you really have time to burn, there's also a Doctor Who wiki!

Good Post on Baking Terms

Some time ago, courtesy of Ceely's Modern Usage, I traipsed around in the wonderful world of English usage blogs and stumbled upon a blog that is devoted to, of all things, "Lower Case L":

The gist of lowercase L is this: I have noticed that, when people create handwritten signs, they sometimes choose to capitalize every letter except the letter "L". I can understand using some lowercase letters like "i" and "y", to stylize the handwriting. But why confuse matters by using the only letter that, when lowercase, is identical to an uppercase "I"?

Great! Now I'm going to see this everywhere! Just like greengrocers apostrophe's. (Yes. I did that on purpose.) Of course, I'm not really complaining here. One of my undergraduate majors was English: Looking for usage errors is a form of intellectual masochism for lots of us....

I bring this up because a friend of mine, now in linguistics, emailed me recently to thank me for introducing him, via my blog, to 43-Man Squamish. In the process, I seem to have solved a conundrum for him: He was looking for something to translate into Tajiki for homework! One day a few decades from now, if you stumble across something on the Discovery Channel about a peculiar (but mysterious) fascination with 43-Man Squamish among the Tajiks, you will at least know why. Reading this blog is its own reward!

Oh! Right. I was getting ready to mention a post on baking terms. (Perhaps "baked" might describe the distinctive stream-of-consciousness style I've slipped into!) Well, the common thread is my past in the humanities and my friend, the linguist. Over the course of the correspondence, he also pointed to this interesting post by an American living in Britain about the huge difference in baking terminology (and tastes) on the two sides of the Atlantic.

British biscuits would be called crackers in AmE if they're savo(u)ry or cookies if they're sweet, but American cookies have made definite inroads here in the past few years, with cookie shops like Ben's Cookies (my favo(u)rite: peanut) and Millie's Cookies (my favo(u)rite: raspberry and white chocolate) serving American-style cookies. One wouldn't call those biscuits, as they're soft. My dad (what a guy!) sent me Christmas cookies the last time I was in England for the holidays. (One needs familiar baked goods at holidays, I think, and in the UK it's all about mince pies [AmE prefers mincemeat pies].) I showed Better Half how we put a slice of bread in the cookie tin in order to keep the cookies soft. He looked at me in horror and said, "Why would you want to do that?"

I don't particularly care for most baked goods, preferring to ferment my grains instead, but I still found this post to be very good reading.

Forget the Others

Reader Michael Gold sent me a link to a good review of Richard Feynman, A Life in Science by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin Dutton. Here's an excerpt from the book as quoted in the review.

Feynman had got to know [biologist James] Watson during the sabbatical year that Dick had spent as a 'graduate student' in biology. He had an opportunity to renew the acquaintance when he visited Chicago early in 1967, and when they met Watson gave Feynman a copy of the typescript of what was to become his famous book The Double Helix, about his discovery, together with Francis Crick, of the structure of DNA. Feynman read the book straight through, the same day. He had been accompanied on that trip by David Goodstein, then a young physicist just completing his PhD at Caltech, and late that night Feynman collared Goodstein and told him that he had to read Watson's book -- immediately. Goodstein did as he was told, reading through the night while Feynman paced up and down, or sat doodling on a pad of paper. Some time towards dawn, Goodstein looked up and commented to Feynman that the surprising thing was that Watson had been involved in making such a fundamental advance in science, and yet he had been completely out of touch with what everybody else in his field was doing.

Feynman held up the pad he had been doodling on. In the middle, surrounded by all kinds of scribble, was one word, in capitals: DISREGARD. That, he told Goodstein, was the whole point. That was what he had forgotten, and why he had been making so little progress. The way for researchers like himself and Watson to make a breakthrough was to be ignorant of what everybody else was doing and plough their own furrow. [pp. 185-186, bold added]

This reminds me of my own saying: "Real scientists don't have 'pet theories'."

-- CAV