A small selection of the many things that have happened to Dan Sumption, his family, friends and colleagues
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.
Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but The wrod as a wlohe.
Amzanig huh?
(tahkns Soct)
Today I will be mostly listening to 60s Garage Punk. (I really really really really really really want to start up a garage/psychobilly type band, maybe with a bit of, uhm, prog-rock thrown in for good measure [no, seriously!] - anyone interested?)
I took the kids to the Spider Park (but if you’ve read the entry below this one, you already know that). Here’s more about it, with photos.
How peculiar - last night I had a nighmare, in it my car was broken into (one of the girls had left a door slightly ajar when trying to close it) and my car stereo was stolen, among other things. I’ve only had the stereo a couple of months, and I’ve been amazed - normally when I spend a lot of money on something, I get so excited beforehand that I’m soon disappointed afterwards, but with this I kept my expectations low - I only really bought it because we had about 1000 miles to drive in August and I couldn’t have handled it all without sounds - and have experienced nothing but love and adulation for my new Alpine ever since. MP3s of Harry Potter, The Hitch Hikers’ Giude to the Galaxy, plus of course all my favourite choons, have actually had me meandering around the country to make my journeys longer. It’s dreamed-of loss, and my stupidity in not checking the car properly when we left the car park, actually caused me to wake up out of this nightmare yelling aloud in an expression of disgust at my own stupidity (try explaining that to the lodger the next morning!)
Anyway, my previous stereo (which it took me about 18 months to replace) was stolen the one and only night that I forgot to take the faceplate off it. So I’ve tried and tried and tried to be really careful and check every time I leave the car. Yet at the same time I know, that is not in my nature. Well, today it happened - I forgot to take it off when I returned from collecting Lola from the childminder’s - a trip so short that there was no justifiable reason for me to need soundz.
I am so, so, so thankful to Lola for begging to go to the Spider Park tonight - even though Rowan tried to throw a tantrum to prevent us going, Lola and I won the day and we piled into the car to visit the park - at which point I noticed my earlier stupidity, breathed a sigh of relief that the damn stereo was still in there, and promptly took it out before night fell and those hyenas they have on the TV adverts came out to strip down my motor.
My favourite error message in a long time, from this site:
Error 503 - Resource Temporarily Unavailable
This could be for several reasons:
- The site you are visiting has exceeded its bandwidth quota
- The webserver is experiencing an unusually high load
- An invisible monkey is bending the wire that carries your Internet connection, disrupting
the flow of information. Get away, invisible monkey! Get away!Please try again soon.
What a nob-ended skrewt I am. For days now, my Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse has been popping up increasingly dire messages warning me that its batteries are on the way out. So today I finally remembered to get some spares when I was out shopping. And then I thought I’d keep running the mouse just a little bit longer until the performance became annoyingly unreliable. Which it just did.
So imagine my annoyance when I popped the cover and discovered two batteries that both said “AA” on them, having bought a pack of AAAs. I was sure this mouse took the little buggers. Convinced. So much so that at first, I thought there was a printing error on the batteries already in there. Doh!
Still, things could be worse. I do actually have two mice plugged into my computer (yes, I know) - the other one is a Sony one with a built in Memory Stick reader which is strictly speaking unecessary, but which I find very handy for transferring files from my digital camera and to my PDA. It’s normally more hinderance than help, because it sits on the other side of my keyboard and occasionaly I knock it by accident without realising and think “why is the cursor moving”, but today it really came into its own.
Oh my. Metafilter has a list of foodblogs. More than all I can eat, or shake a large wok at.
Here’s an interesting article on the analytical language created by John Wilkins in the Seventeenth Century. And here’s an excerpt:
He divided the universe in forty categories or classes, these being further subdivided into differences, which was then subdivided into species. He assigned to each class a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example: de, which means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a part of the element fire, a flame. In a similar language invented by Letellier (1850) a means animal; ab, mammal; abo, carnivore; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivore; abiv, horse; etc. In the language of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845) imaba means building; imaca, harem; imafe, hospital; imafo, pesthouse; imari, house; imaru, country house; imedo, coloumn; imede, pillar; imego, floor; imela, ceiling; imogo, window; bire, bookbinder; birer, bookbinding.
I wonder what life would be like with such a language. On the one hand, the encyclopaedic nature of the very words we speak would make learning a more rational task (and I’ve no doubt it would make certain forms of linguistic computer programming easier too), but on the other I can’t help thinking that so many words that were so similar could only confuse matters. Also, knowing how hard it is to come up with decent categorisation schemes, I’ve no doubt that this one would seem out-of-date as soon as it had been set in stone. The article goes on to state that in a certain Chinese encyclopaedia:
animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.
In light of which, you have to wonder how much an encyclopaedic language would blinker us into one way of seeing the universe?
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