sardonick

Titus 2:11-12:

“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age”

A counterintuitive concept, especially regarding the way modern culture paints “righteousness”. It is grace that allows us to live sensibly, deny worldly desires, etc. etc. The root of all this action is attributed to “grace”, not “discipline”, or “punishment”, or “guilt”. Need to think about this more to understand it…

Word-loans, and the evolution of language is always so interesting… they give a glimpse into the way that we think that isn’t always so readily seen from everyday life (kind of like using a hex editor to hack into your favorite program, to see what you can find hidden in there). According to Brad Delong,

“Paradise” is derived from the Old Persian word for the wall around an enclosed, irrigated garden. Xenophon mistook the word for the enclosing wall for the word for the garden-park itself, and here we are.

Ming the Mechanic has an interesting post on social status, and how our perception of it affects the way we relate to other people.

Imagine that two strangers are approaching each other along an empty street. It’s straight, hundreds of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at an even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in order to pass. You can see this decision being made 100 yards or more before it has to. In my view the two people scan each other for signs of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they’re equal, both move aside. If they both think they’re dominant (or if one isn’t paying attention) they end up doing the sideways dance and muttering apologies. But this doesn’t happen if you meet a frail or half-blind person: You move aside for them. It’s only when you think the other person is challenging that the dance occurs.

…

A bustling crowd is constantly and unconsciously exchanging status signals and challenges, with the more submissive person stepping aside.

Interpersonal dynamics you never think about when you live in the moment. But I wonder if it works both ways, once you realize it (that is, can you make people think you’re “higher social status”, just by walking like you are?
(Slightly related to the old graphology question of “If your handwriting shows your personality, can you change your personality by changing your handwriting?”).

Hmmm….

And just when i was feeling completely settled into Linux again, we have a meeting this morning where an Ordinance From On High tells me we must begin work in C# instead of Java. (why C#? why not even C++? they say the dev environment is better, or that it’s more like java, or that it has better data collection…or something… this is the stuff Holy Wars are fought over, and it doesn’t look like “I have ethical issues with C#” or “C++ is more portable/reusable in the research community” are going to fly as excuses as to why not to use C#). Resign, resign, resign myself to it I guess.

Was able to set up mono this morning after the news, and a nifty mono plugin for eclipse… We’ll see if things work out nicely after all.

I could attempt to placate myself by saying it’ll be good to have the opportunity to start things new–I’m not entirely happy with the way that my system processed phonological disfluencies in my current version, here’s the chance to do it right…

And it will be good to learn C#, if only to have another skill under my belt…

But still…

::goes off to sulk in a corner::

Been a lot of posts in the blogosphere about English:

• From mefi: “The British Library has compiled an online archive of northern speech dating back to the 19th century. The recordings range from from audio from Victorian cylinder dictaphones to 1950s football fans chanting.”
• From Language Log:
  • “an experiment comparing how different English accents are perceived by native and non-native speakers.”
  • The BBC’s take on accents in England
  • A bit about “Estuary English“

This all seems a lot more real after visitting England this summer.
Of course, what i really gotta learn is Cockney Rhyming Slang

• www.khaaan.com
• Khan remixed with Office Space (i love the slow, slow speaking pace of the Office Space clip, and how it drags you along in expectation of the interruption. Simply masterful :) …)