Status

Packing for the trip to Paris tomorrow Glad to be going there; but a litttle sad to be leaving here. Our stay in this little French village, with this family, has been magical.

L'Observation

Its some kind of special when you can casually say "It's nice here today --lets not go to Paris until tomorrow..."

Learning

Things I have learned thus far on summer vacation-

a) The French don't know the meaning of 'well-done'.

b) French drivers go very fast on narrow roads.

c) Some French public restrooms have neither bidets nor toilet paper.

d) Little French kids sound cute when they say Bonjour.

e) Noticing that the young girl you hosted last summer is now a sexy young woman can be a really unsettling experience.Though you are still delighted to see her; you can't treat her as the same person.

f) Things seem to cost more in Euros. We've spent HOW much already???

And-

With the right people, the whole experience is delightful. Like our new friends: From the daughter to the dog to the son to the rabbit; and most especially the parents: they are a joy. We are damned lucky.

Vraiment.

En France

My wife arrived in France to join me and my daughter at the home of our new friends. At first I was jealous - up to then, it had been just my daughter and me; and I didnt like sharing 'my' French family with her: But I got over it: Pretty much.

Just spent twenty minutes trying to get the French mobile phone to work. Turns out that just because the phone number starts with a zero doesnt mean you can ignore the zero: 06 and 07 are nationwide area codes for mobile phones;

I am very glad that we came. We are doing some fun things; but we are doing very quiet things; too. Do kind of wish we could order pizza; though. This is a very small town; no Pizza Hut here!

I will miss this place, and this family: Especially the family. They are unbelievably friendly and generous. It is as if we have known them for years. And tonight; we go to see the girl whose arrival started it all.

NASA

No, it's not a real NASA ad. In fact, it was done by a Canadian kid. To whom, many thanks. Because it's awesome.



Found here.

Two for Two

Each girl coming here as an exchange student accepted my Friend request on Facebook, which included a note saying that I was going to be their host father.

Each girl did not respond to a later email from me to them inside Facebook.

Each girl accepted a Facebook friend request from my wife, which included a note saying that she was going to be their host mother.

Each girl did respond to a later email from her to them inside Facebook.


I think I see a trend.

Memories

Observation

We went to a fast-food restaurant to grab lunch. I discovered that having a very large person in your line of sight is a good inducement to eat more slowly, and not finish those fries. Or the shake.

Bikerman

I'm not a biker, but I was delighted by this video.

Transformation

My goodness.

Found here.

Fictive

Fictive learning sounds like something you’d do surreptitiously, but according to an article in Wired Magazine on the neuroscience of why intelligent people respond to financial bubbles, it’s not only a key contributor to that type of event, it’s also a basic evolutionary trait.

If your ancestor found that standing here made it easier to club that mastodon for dinner than standing over there, that ancestor was more likely to stand here next time, too. And when he clubbed that mastodon successfully - possibly doing the primitive equivilent of the fist-pump as the beast collapsed - he got a rush of reinforcement in a part of the brain that 'rewards' us when we do something that's perceived as good. That same part of the brain flashes when we do something that earns us more money than we had any reason to expect, in the financial market, making it more likely that we'll try whatever maneuver got us that rush, the next time that the opportunity arises. We can even get this rush second-hard when we see others doing well -- we think if I did what he did, I'd be buying that new Beemer, just like him! -- again, making it more likely that next time, we will do that.

The article could have been a little more detailed, with some insight into not only the psychology of the process when it's in full swing, but the flow of events that trigger the determination that this is a bubble, after all -- holy hell, the emperor's naked! Bail out! Bail OUT!!! -- would have been nice, but it's an interesting article anyway. It can be found here.

Next Up

Getting a little bit of an uneasy feeling about the kid who's going to be coming here in July.

Didn't draw too much conclusion from the fact that she didn't respond to the facebook mails we sent. But she did friend me there, so I'm looking at some of her pictures. And, well -- for one, she is noticably larger than everyone else in the pictures. Not so much fat as just bulky. (The first girl, by comparison, was and is slender and athletic). That surprises me. And second, one of her pictures is -- well, it's someone's butt, with 'kiss kiss' written on it, and her name. Uh-huh.

What exactly are we in for?

Conservative, and...

I occasionally flatter myself that I "think about politics". I don't, really, though I do try. Part of that is trying to find people who can elucidate the conservative point of view in a way that's both intelligent and respectful of differing opinions.

The Rational Middle: A Conservative Approach To Liberal Thinking seems to fit that description.

The Guard

I found this on Devour, an interesting video search site.

This one, too.

Design

I just read a bit in Idoru where a character comes to the realization that devices -- computers, but really anything where the guts of the device aren't necessarily related to the externals -- are inherently wasteful. You want a new computer, you buy one and trash the whole of the other - when, usually, all you really wanted was a newer operating system or more storage. He comes up with the idea of divorcing the two, selling the ability to swap out as needed. I've often wondered why my data on a computer is on the same memory device -- hard drive, though it doesn't have to be -- as the computer's operating system. Why can't they be separate, so that when I want a new operating system, I either swap out or flash-update the computer's part?

Why not?

Reading

I'm going to be stopping my French study today, after the class I'll have in about an hour. Not forever -- I'll be starting again after July, after the French kid leaves - but it seems silly to study right up to the moment of departure -- why not study on the plane? on final approach to DeGaulle? In the terminal? In its place, I'm starting to read normal things again. By which I mean, things unrelated to learning the French language. Not that I ever actually stopped reading other things -- I'm reading Idoru, for example, and enjoying it a great deal (I just wrote that as exjoying, and somehow I think that ought to be a word) -- but for a long time I felt guilty if I didn't spend time studying. Not studying studying, the way that a grammar teacher would teach the language, but doing something with French -- looking at Anki flashcards, puzzling my way through Le Monde, doing a bit of Rosetta Stone. As a result, I feel relatively confident that I'll be able to communicate in France -- though I am sure I'll be aghast at how much I cannot say; even now, I practice some phrases that I want to be able to use, like Je suis tres heureux etre ici, et voir vous enfin -- I'm very glad to be here, and to see you at last (I don't know if that's syntactically correct) -- and I'm dismayed at how hard it is to remember. Not to mention, to pronouce words like heureux. I love it when I get the sound right of those mouth-gargling words French has, but I can't always do it on command. Sometimes I sound less like a Frenchman and more like a cat, hocking up a hairball.

But I digress.

One of the books that I've started reading is one that I'd gotten from a Used Book sale at a local college. It's a collection of science-based science fiction -- what's called hard science science fiction. This doesn't always mean that the writing is good, but it does mean that the writer put some thought into the science behind the story. As has happened to me on occasion, once I got it home and started to read, I said There's a reason I liked the sound of this book... I donated it !!! But still, I read it, because I do like this kind of thing. Right now I'm reading Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress. It's speculation on what would happen if we found a way to do without sleep. From that Wikipedia link: The novel's title comes from its primary moral question, as presented by character Tony Indivino: what do productive and responsible members of society owe the "beggars in Spain," the unproductive masses who have nothing to offer except need?

How good is this story?

I'm reading it slowly, that's how good. I do not want it to end, even as This sounds awfully like Ayn Rand occurs to me. Not fond of her. But the science here? Love it.

Woody? Is that you?

Found here.

The Velluvial Matrix

I have this image of Indian doctors -- by which I mean people of Indian, by which I mean India, descent who live in the United States and practice medicine -- as being geeks. Supercilious geeks. I'm not sure where I got that image. I can actually only remember meeting two or three people who fit that Indian Doctor mold, and while one was a geek, two weren't. But somehow, the image lives on. Want to go to a doctor? Skip the Indian one -- they're arrogant geeks.

Except for Atul Gawande. He's a geek, but he's a literate one. I'll read almost anything he choose to write. He writes fluidly, intelligently, well.

There can be rocky bits, I know. Like the book where he talked about the need for checklists in medicine. It's an intriguing concept, but I had the misfortune to listen to it on an MP3 player while I was at the gym. I cut that session on the elliptical short, because listening to someone go into detail about nasty things that can happen in medicine -- they flew her to the trauma center, where they cracked the chest of this eight year old girl, using a power saw to cut down the middle, so that they could reach inside and palpate her heart -- I did not enjoy the experience, and I couldn't skip past it without going to the whole next section. Grisly imagery.

But as a rule, he's well worth the time. Even when he's using phrases like the velluvial matrix - you've heard of it, I'm sure -- I like him.

IID

I woke up this morning thinking about keyword extraction systems.

Now, I should mention that I know nothing about keyword extraction systems, which are tools to take a body of data and develop tags or phrases to categorize the data's content. I used to know a teeny tiny bit about ten years ago, but now, nada. I'm doing good to remember the word 'corpus', which is (or at least was) the elegant way of referring to ' a bunch of stuff that we're trying to analyse'. Usually, you would see things like ' a corpus consisting of the collected works of Shakespeare' for someone who was trying to find a way to analyze Shakespeare's work for underlying themes. Since corpus could also mean 'dead', I suppose it's still a good way of thinking about my level of knowledge.

According to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Infinite Improbability Drive was created by an engineering student after his betters had collectively said that such a feat was impossible. His insight was that while such a drive was, by definition, infinitely impossible, if you assumed that it was possible, then the degree of impossibility had to be a finite number. He solved for that, built the drive, got the Galactic Prize for Extreme Cleverness, and was then stoned to death by his peeved betters.

I don't anticipate anything like that happening to me, because I'm not nearly bright enough. I know all the smart guys have all the approaches to this mountain range mapped out fifteen ways from Sunday, including two that involve creation of a hyperspatial bypass.

I just like thinking about it.

(Update: On a walk this morning, it occurred to me that perhaps the WordCloud software might be helpful here.)