To those who complain that language and literature classes are unnecessary and impractical dead weight in a modern, focused technical curriculum, I would point out that language is a tool for planting ideas and images of your choosing into someone else's mind. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a superpower. Wouldn't you like to know how to wield it

I regularly run into people with the strange misconception that Ph.D. programmes exist so that those peculiar folk who aspire to the life of a university professor may fulfill that ambition; and that the number of Ph.D.s produced is or ought to be commensurate with the demand for academics. Balderdash. Students embark on a Ph.D. because they want ( Read more... )

I saw my first movie in a Danish theatre Thursday night. I'd rate X-Men: First Class a competently executed but uninspired bit of entertainment. James McAvoy proves that he can act suavely capable as well as spineless. Michael Fassbender and Kevin Bacon prove that wounded, cynical humans with nothing to lose are far more frightening than ( Read more... )

Is there a connection between spy-novel-writing and cookery? Len Deighton is a noted culinary author who taught Michael Caine to break an egg properly for the movie version of the Ipcress File, and Ian Fleming's one and only children's novel ends on a recipe for fudge which I shall have to try out.

That there should exist, by now, a purely Klingon opera is unsurprising. That it should have had a successful opening run in the Hague is more interesting. That its title should consist of two glottal stops separated by a single vowel is awesome.

I have a flawless scientific and philosophical model of reality.
Unfortunately, it's actual size.
I get annoyed when a theorist presents a tractable simplified model and then gets attacked in the questions for leaving bits of the real system out of her description by some audience member who wants to prove they were paying attention. Leaving bits ( Read more... )

RNE Clásica continues to be the radio station to which I am most consistently happy to listen, its deep musical variety and comprehensible commentary trumping Dansk Radio's P2. But spending too much time with it won't do anything good for my habit of using Spanish conjunctions in Danish class.

All disciplines have their jargon; terms that concisely express the particular concepts relevant to the field. Usually that jargon consists of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. I get very suspicious of any jargon that consists of sentences: where jargon words are bricks from which to build thoughts, jargon sentences are canned thoughts to be reused ( Read more... )

Building the (proudly pythonic) Mercurial on a fresh NetBSD machine pulls in perl, bash, f2c , and a slew of microsoft xml libraries (mostly in order to be able to generate the documentation).

Ignorance of the local language has the virtue that it keeps your interactions with Watchtower-wielding proselytisers blessedly short.