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February 28, 2005

Semantics, Semiotics, Let's go shopping!

For who-knows-what reason, this morning I was pondering how odd it is that we have two words, "hooligan" and "hoodlum", that look similar and have the same meaning. Why isn't one word enough? What's the difference? If I mug an old lady on the street, which of those words would best describe me? Luckily, CMU has a subscription to the OED, which says:

hooligan - A young street rough, a member of a street gang.

hoodlum - A youthful street rowdy; 'a loafing youth of mischievous proclivities'; a dangerous rough.

It seems that the hoodlum is the older, more hardened version of a hooligan. I'm 30, and while that might qualify as youthful, it's probably not young. "Hoodlum" it is.

February 23, 2005

Simpler is better

As a researcher, I'm constantly looking for a non-trivial problem to solve. It's got to look really difficult, and it's got to be the right "type" of difficult (I'm not going to come up with a quicker quicksort, for instance). It's obvious that solving a difficult problem takes hard work and a lot of thought, so one of the most challenging parts of working on a hard problem is knowing when to throw in the towel and move on.

What I just realized (after my advisor pretty much pointed it out to me) is that it's just as important to find a seemingly trivial problem and ponder why it isn't trivial. This is not the same as taking a trivial problem and adding extraneous constraints to it until it's no longer trivial. Rather, it's more about taking a problem and delving into the details of the solution.

I'm going to see how far I can push this. From now on, I'm only going to tackle the easy problems.

February 12, 2005

The Germans

The other night I was going to Whole Foods to buy dinner. As usual, the parking lot was moving at a crawl (that place is always packed). I was behind a volvo station wagon and this volvo wasn't moving at all. At first I thought it was because the volvo was waiting for a car to unpark, but then it still didn't move.

Seriously annoyed, I pulled around the volvo, and took the space that had opened up right in front of it. As I was parking, I heard honking. When I got out of my car, this middle-aged woman who had just gotten out of the volvo started berating me, loudly, in a German accent. Why had I taken this parking place? Where was my decency? Who did I think I was? All in rapid-fire succession, and with no letup. As I got to the entrance, she grabbed a basket and shouted "You want a basket? Here, take mine! Take it!" So I did. She grabbed a second basket and said "You want another? Take this one too!" I said "No, thanks, one's enough" and went into the store.

Since I'm a wimp, this had sent me into adrenaline overload. I tried to shop but felt jangly, half expecting the woman to show up again, possibly with store management in tow. I rushed through the store, but as I was finishing up at the salad bar, a middle-aged man approached me, and he too began berating me in a German accent. I spent a moment pondering whether it was possible I had made a bad parking decision. Then I asked him: "That was your wife getting out of the car, right? So how could I know you weren't just dropping her off?" He looked at me for a second or so, then walked off indignantly.

This is upper middle-class urban warfare at its worst. Maybe if Whole Foods'd lower the price on their organic tomatoes, or get some tilapia back in stock, we could see peace in our time. Until then, we'd all do well to keep an eye out for acts of terrorism: the bag of overpriced dried figs subtly dropped into our cart, or even the insidious substitution of regular vegetable samosas for wheat-free.

February 10, 2005

I had the funniest dream the other night...

Word on the street has it that I laugh in my sleep. I'm told it's not the happy-sounding type of laughter. It's more the "I'm up to something" sort. Don't know what that's about.

February 02, 2005

Four quick views of Groundhog Day

1. That Bill Murray movie. A cult classic, somewhat like Joe Versus the Volcano.

2. A silly superstition invented in Europe. Europe!

3. Folkways are the best ways. Punxsutawny, PA is situated between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes such that the early February cloud cover there can predict the gulf stream's patterns over the next 6 weeks.

4. Deconstruction. If we begin from the notion that a shadow represents mortality, then seeing a shadow is tantamount to recognizing one's own mortality. Only in accepting our coming death can we truly seize the joy of life. Hence, spring.

Special bonus link: Haruki Murakami's novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, features a subplot set in a town where people's shadows are literally cut off and banished. A very strange and wonderful novel, outwardly random-strange but underneath it all, creepy-strange.

Special bonus link 2: Punxsutawny Phil has seen his shadow.