Some Mild Festivities

As today is my birthday...

Gin and Tonic

4ish Ice Cubes (made with tonic water if you like to think ahead)
1 mini can Tonic Water
2 jiggers Gin (Bombay Sapphire, ooh la la)
1 Lime 

In a highball glass, combine gin and tonic water over ice.  Garnish with slice of lime.  Add lime juice if you are feeling especially limey.  

Really, this is not precisely rocket science.

Bonus: malaria prevention!

Ready Set Go

I've been reading Darwin (for Darwin class) and learning about African colonization (in Africa class), and for some reason thought of an image I'd seen once a long time ago.  I don't think it was this one exactly, but it's close enough:

It's from a book (Maury's New Complete Geography, to be precise) from the turn of the previous century.  For whatever reason, it made the people on the blog where it was first posted rather indignant.  Does it make these readers uncomfortable?  Why - or why not?

On a lighter note, while I was searching for the image, I stumbled into the land of Hetalia fanart.  Sampling from one of many deviantART galleries...

Which brings me back: have we changed? I think so...but how?

And "Greece got hotter" may or may not be an acceptable answer.

A Billion

I knew that a billion isn't always a billion, depending on where one is...but I had no idea how pervasive this problem was.

1 000 000: Everyone agrees it's a cool million. So that's good.

1 000 000 000: Well I think it's a billion...so that must mean I follow the short scale. Apparently though, if you're from somewhere like Italy, Croatia, Ecuador, or Belgium, this is either a thousand-million or a milliard. Umm.

1 000 000 000 000: The short scale goes with trillion, but the long scale says that this is a billion, and that all of us in the USA, the UK, Iran, and the Ukraine were premature.

1 000 000 000 000 000: Either a quadrillion...or a billiard.  Yes, like the ball.  I know.  Rather understated, I think...

And so we continue merrily along with my quintillion being someone else's trillion, my sextillion being their trilliard, and hopefully I figure it out before I meet my foreign, mysteriously wealthy CEO, because we are literally talking about millions - I think we can all agree on that figure - of pairs of shoes.

Interesting People

Porcelain and Glass

I read somewhere - and of course I forget where - that, possibly due to the tea craze in ancient China, the Chinese only used porcelain vessels for drinking, eating, etc., and never got around to inventing glass (as all red-blooded alcohol-drinking civilizations have done...perhaps to show off the deep, rich tones of their Merlots).  Anyway.  Without glass, this society - normally so trend-setting when it came to printing presses, compasses, gunpowder, and all other things technological - was stuck using waxed paper in place of windowpanes, lamps, and other things that are better off (a) transparent and (b) non-flammable.

Very interesting.

I'm not sure if it's strictly true or just one of those good historical stories, but I think the lesson to be learned is that we shouldn't be so attached to one way of doing things that we close ourselves off from other ideas.

A truth universally acknowledged...

 

...and I should probably cite where I got that from.  But I forget where that was.  So...yeah.

The Formation of Words

What are the ways a word can be formed? Not too surprisingly, the linguists have got this one covered. Let's see if I can't sum it up (with help from my old friend, Wikipedia):

Conversion, a sort of semantic extension where old words take on new meaning, is possibly the method by which the bulk of English words come into existence (take mistress).  Another obvious origin is the borrowing of loan words from other languages (naive).

There's also compounding, where several words are strung together (like mailbox); blending, where parts of words are joined (such as smog or sonar) agglutination, where prefixes, infixes, or suffixes are added (fearlessness); and back-formation (as in edit, from editor).

When onomatopoeic words are separated out, neologisms in modern-day English are relatively rare; that is, we very rarely speak in language that has not got some subtext, some history.  Interesting?  If we aren't using novel words, if everything we say is referring to something else, how much of what we think is unique?  And if our thoughts aren't original, what about our actions?

Or, then again, perhaps the productivity of language saves us from staleness after all.