The established pattern of my thought processes is that I get funny notions into my head and sort of let them stew in there for a while, for no apparent reason and with no obvious trigger. Such has been the case with what I present today. This won't be structured and it likely won't be pretty. Think of it as a philosophical doodle—just a sloppy sketch that may or may not contain a kernel of something worth pursuing in a more formal structure at some point. ----- Based on what we generally know about physics [not including quantum mechanics, which very few of us have any reasonable conception of], it seems to me that a perfectly sane person might reasonably conclude the following: If we could accurately model the position, spin, direction, and velocity of every particle in the universe at any given moment, it would be theoretically possible to plug that data all into an imaginary supercomputer and predict with perfect accuracy the exact state of everything at any future poin...

Well, I filled my fuel tank for the second time since replacing the engine. The first fill-up was right after I took delivery, so it really doesn't count. Now that I have driven the new engine around for nearly a week, I finally have my first inkling of how it's doing on fuel economy. The result? A fantastic 38 mpg! Well, given how much the repair cost, I've been looking for the bright side, and here's how I found it: I took the initial mileage with the new engine and compared it to the recent mileage of the old engine, and assumed (falsely, of course) that the difference will be constant. Then I built an algebraic equation to suit my whims, and determined that the new engine will pay for itself. Specifically, if we assume that the average price of gas will be $2 per gallon, it will pay for itself over the course of 194,746 miles. At an average of $3 per gallon, it will pay for itself over the course of 129,831 miles. And if we assume that the average price of a gallon...

I can't begin to tell you why I have been thinking of this recently, just that I have. I remember in third grade, we had a classroom spelling bee, which I won. My winning word was "government". I remember pausing after the "R", considering whether the "N" belonged or not. It did not occur to me to ask for a repeated pronunciation or for alternate pronunciations, and it occurred to me that when I had heard the word spoken, it was most often the pronunciation in which the "N" is dropped — which is a legitimate alternate pronunciation in the dictionaries I consulted this morning before starting this blog entry. I opted to throw in the mysterious "N", and I won the bee. Surely my finest moment in this life. Presumably, winning the classroom spelling bee would have qualified me to go on to compete against all of the other classroom champions in a school-wide bee. However, I have absolutely no recollection of any such thing. I would be a...

For some reason, I've recently been thinking much more about my elementary school years. I had gone quite a lot of years without having thought much at all about them. Interesting that I should have recently started remembering bits of childhood that I thought were forgotten. Strange that I've actually been pondering them. I remember that we used to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of every school day. I participated with as much vigor as did each of my classmates. It was a recitation that was learned by rote. Participation was expected, and there was no question as to whether to participate or not. (That came later.) What strikes me as the most interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that, as far as I can recall (and I firmly believe this to be true), we were never taught what it actually means . Big words involved there! Why were we taught to use the word "allegiance" in kindergarten (or first grade at the latest), without being taught its definition? W...

Of all the pithy sayings I've ever devised, the following is surely among my favorites: You can say anything with words. If one keeps in mind what I wrote a few days ago about original ideas, one might wonder whether I was the first to formulate this sentence. I'm quite certain the answer is no. A quick Google search shows that whether I was the first or not, I'm surely not the only, although the sentence does appear surprisingly infrequently in the Google database. I think the statement is true, although it may sometimes be difficult to find the appropriate words, and it may (on rare occasions) be necessary to invent new words to achieve the objective. An interesting side-effect of this ability to say anything with words is that it's possible to say things that make no sense. Even more exciting: It's extraordinarily easy to say things that nobody has ever said before. This, despite many people's claims that "there's nothing new under the sun" or ...

I'm always disturbed by people claiming that Columbus did not "discover" America, on the grounds that people were already here. (There are other grounds on which to argue with the Columbus discovery myth, like (a) where he landed and (b) that there seems no good reason to call him Columbus. (Cristóbal Colón seems more likely the guy's name.)) Discovery does not require being the first to discover something. All it requires is finding something when you weren't already certain it was there. Although, even that requirement is a little sketchy. I think you can "discover" the truth, even though you were already aware of its existence. Anyway, I've gone off on a tangent even before I've started with the topic of this post. Today, I thought I'd mention some original thoughts I've had. They were original thoughts, because as far as I knew, nobody had previously had them. I've since discovered that I was not the first person to have them, how...

I also happened to invite the Linguistic Mystic to have a look at my July 31 post. He did so and was kind enough to give me a nice credit as the inspiration for his latest post , an interesting discussion of the mysteries of whether "tomorrow" begins at midnight or at wakey-time. Thanks, Linguistic Mystic. Today's the third in my little series of linguistic discussions, again inspired by newscasters: Why would you say "an historic event"? I believe Peter Jennings used to do this. I always considered Peter Jennings to be the perfect exemplar of accent-free American English, despite his Canadian origins (Eh?). (Of course, it's all accents, really...and what I think of as "accent-free" is just as much an accent as is Apu-speak from The Simpsons . At the very least, however, Jennings didn't drop his R's or his H's and there was no chance of confusing the white race with the white rice.) So why Jennings (and others who don't drop their ...

This morning, I invited most of the authors of the Language Log blog to take a look at my last blog entry. (Most, not all, only because there were a few whose e-mail addresses I was unable to locate.) Anyway, what has ensued is a fairly fascinating discussion that's been carried on via an e-mail thread rather than as comments to my blog. Oh well. At least they all included me in the e-mails, which have been most edifying. (They're a bunch of professional linguists, and I certainly am not.) So here's the gist of what seems to be the consensus: Both usages are in common parlance. This does cause confusion when people of one camp converse with people of the other camp (especially when scheduling, as the "next Wednesday" issue is just as much a problem as is the "last Wednesday" issue). The rift does not seem to be a recent development. This has been previously studied from a linguistic perspective. Such divergent dialectical usages are probably more common...

Last week (a phrase that I believe pretty much always means "the week before this one"), I was listening to the radio, as I do regularly while at work. The day was Wednesday, July 25, and I was reminded of something that's been bothering me (mildly) for quite a while now. The radio announcer mentioned the YouTube Debate that happened "last Monday". That debate had happened on Monday, July 23. That's a mere two days before the report I was listening to. When I'm speaking, if it's a Wednesday, and I say "last Monday", what I mean is "the Monday of the previous week". That is, "9 days ago". This is the idiomatic usage that I grew up with, and I believed that within the English speaking world, it was pretty much universal usage. On a Wednesday, if I want to speak about something that happened two days earlier, I am happy to say "two days ago" or "on Monday". (Using a past tense verb in conjunction with th...

Well, Beth was working this morning, so I was left to my own devices. After taking the recycling to the local recycling center, I popped into Shirley's Restaurant in Claremont for a Bill Richardson "Meet and Greet", which I knew from the local paper was scheduled for this morning. The owner of the restaurant, Dan Fillo, was quoted in the paper as having said, "We've been told by the campaign not to expect a question and answer format. He's probably just going to come in and speak, giving a brief 10- or 15-minute speech about his platforms." So I was quite pleasantly surprised when after giving his talk, Richardson did open the floor to questions. In my last blog post, I mentioned that Beth got in the last question from the floor at our session with John McCain. I didn't say anything about what she asked him, however. So here I'll mention that she asked him about Darfur. We were both bothered that it took until she got in (right under the wire) fo...

We went to our first presidential campaign town hall meeting today. This time was an event for John McCain at the American Legion hall in Claremont. I was surprised to get the phone invitation the other day from McCain's people. I guess he's courting the independent vote. As this will be our first presidential election cycle since moving to New Hampshire, I'm still not altogether certain of the process. From what I gather, we'll be allowed to choose which primary we want to cast our ballots in (assuming we wish to cast our ballots in either primary). If you've read my campaign web site, you'll probably already be aware that I am, on principle, opposed to the whole two-party system. By extension, I'm also of the opinion that there ought not to be a primary election cycle. I think we'd all be much better off if we just went straight to the general election. Stop playing this game of trying to determine which of our like-minded people would best represent a...

I watched some of the Republican debate the other night. There was a point at which the questioner asked for a show of hands of who does not believe in evolution. Much to my disgust, some hands went up. I didn't catch whose hands those were, but I checked the New York Times online edition for the transcript , and they reported that the hands that went up belonged to Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo. Assuming that the NYT transcript is correct, and assuming that the question's intent was clearly understood*, and assuming that we're not dealing with a semantic issue of what "believe in" means...these three men should automatically be deemed unelectable. So here's where the semantic issue comes in: Does "believe in evolution" mean "accept that evolution is a process that actually occurs"? or... Does "believe in evolution" mean "put your faith and trust in evolution"? If it means the former, then Brownback, Huckabee, and Ta...

I've been listening to public radio quite a lot recently and I've been reading Robert Reich's blog . These have stimulated in me some thoughts that I think might be worth mentioning here in my blog: Why are Americans so adept at electing presidents who are either incapable or unwilling when it comes to properly pronouncing the word "nuclear"? It's just three syllables. The "E" is long. There's only one "U". And the "C" is followed by an "L" with no vowel between them. How difficult is that? If there are any high school teachers reading this who might have a bit of free time to run a simple experiment, I'd appreciate the following: Have your students take out a sheet of paper. Ask your students to each write 20 complete sentences of varying complexity. Stress that the goal is 20 complete sentences. The subject matter is irrelevant. There is no requirement to tell truths. There is no requirement that the sentence...