tuesday, march 27, 2007
Excerpts from my moleskine, part II
Here’s some of what I’ve written in my notebook, both so I can find it later and so you can read it. See the first part of this series.
Draw, you rogue, for though it be night, yet the moon shines. I’ll make a sop o’ the moonshine of you. You whoreson cullionly barbermonger, draw!
From King Lear, Act II, scene 2.
Some of my notes on a talk by Steven Pinker:
Swearing is an emotional weapon; it invokes the supernatural, scatology, disease/death, sexuality, and disfavored people, and uses poetic devices to engage the listener.
The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by the glows of algebra and abstraction.
From The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, page 24.
A professor visiting my CCS history class said that educational experiments never fail. People get interested and excited, try to make it work, overlook imperfections, put in effort — even if the idea behind the experience isn’t very good — so they learn a lot.
Real ladybugs don’t look much like some of the symbols that represent them; “friendly” bugs get anthropomorphized pretty heavily. Many pictures of ladybugs apply baby-mammal-like proportions to the defining features of their insecthood. Compare this to symbols representing spiders.
(Excellent sticker courtesy of Nasty Nets. And not actually in my moleskine, but relevant:)
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