Daily Connotations

Daily Connotations

Entropy Happens.
Join the madness.

You don't have to push the boundaries when you set the standards.

Connotation. 1. a. The configuration of suggestive or associative implications consitiuting the general sense of an abstract espression beyond its literal, explicit sense. b. A secondary meaning suggested by a word in addition to its literal meaning. 3. Logic The total of the attributes constituting the meaning of a term.

Observations, opinions, and ideas, all brought to you by Daily Connotations Company. Who Else?

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Disclaimer: Any opinions contained on this page are those of, well, we don't really know who. Any offense taken to anything present should be directed to Sven, who will file and ignore your comments. Praise or compliments can be directed to either Dr. N, Dr. What, or Dr. Olga. All plagarized material has been tested and deemed satisfactory according to the esteemed code of Lehrer, version 2.3.
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Things We Like

Sven Bjorn Borg: Sven has been with d-con since its humble beginnings, and is responsible for punctuating, finances, guarding the office from rabid dogs and loud noises, and acting as mediator amongst the other members. Dr. Borge is well-known as the world's foremost (and perhaps only) underwater-basket-weaving expert. Sven has recently published no less than 3 books, Klingon Grammar and Vocabulary for humans, Life among the Grapes, and Escher, Bach, Gödel: A gigantic elastic bungalow. In it's copious spare time, the Sven enjoys playing the harpsichord and diagramming sentences. Sven is Chief of Staff and Director of Intelligence in the UPICN,LLC.
Dr. Bob William "The Orange" Lavoisier a.k.a. Dr. Henry Parsons: Dr. N, as we like to call him, is officially the initiator of the Daily Connotations Company, and also holds important Offices in the VVIIPP society of America and The Department of Redundancy Department, which is a place where he holds an important office in the department of redundancy. Henry also spent a good deal of his life studying the behavior of Walruses (Walri?) in the wild, inspired by a long-running correspondence with Mr. J. Lennon, who, in fact, convinced "The Orange" that he was, in fact, a walrus. Dr. Parsons' curriculum vitae is rounded out by his extensive family history (including a brother, Alan), and double Ph.D. honors in Botany and the Study of Scandinavian Languages. Recently, Dr. Henry Parsons was elected president of the UPICN,LLC
The Doctor a.k.a. Dr. What??: Dr. What joins us now as a member of d-Con in very good standing. It is important that the doctor not be confused with his slightly-more-popular brother, Doctor Who, who has carved a niche for himself in the field of time travel. Dr. What never developed the talent for time travel, and has the ability to visit only two distinct temporal locations: The beheading of John the Baptist and that one time when Stanley met Livingstone (or was it Livingstone met Stanley?) Consequently, he spends much of his time knitting (the scarves, natch) on the planet Gallifrey whilst (and at the same time) contemplating Nietzschean philosophies and memorizing much of Immanuel Kant's work, both in the original German.
Dr. Phelealabean: Dr. Phelealabean also uses the alias Dr. Olga Olathe Parsons-Uhlmer. Dr. Parsons-Uhlmer is a sister to Henry and Alan. She has a dual honorary doctorate in Arabian Literature and Language. She also has teaching experience at the University of Rekjavik which was held in a small grass-covered hut. She iswidowed after an incident involving her husband and abandonment which she is not allowed to discuss pending criminal charges. Now that she is alone, she enjoys spending summers with her brother, Henry, in his summer home, The Parsonon.

9.29.2005

Heres to everyones (let's see, at last count he was) 4th favorite physicist, Enrico Fermi.

--Posted by a. on Thursday, September 29, 2005.

9.28.2005

Book Banner

--Posted by s. on Wednesday, September 28, 2005.

"

. "

-Buster Keaton.

--Posted by s. on Wednesday, September 28, 2005.

9.27.2005

You know what is not easy?
Sloving a virtual Rubik's Cube

--Posted by a. on Tuesday, September 27, 2005.

9.25.2005

I have this theory that you can roughly judge someone's age by how long they take to answer their email.

And I have a bit of empirical evidence to support it.

--Posted by s. on Sunday, September 25, 2005.

9.24.2005

Oh, man, I never used to like drinking milk (just plain) - but the past week i've been guzzling it like crazy.

It's like my body is telling me I need to get more calcium or something.

Just have this crazy craving for beautiful, cold, white MILK!

(It does a body good)

--Posted by s. on Saturday, September 24, 2005.

9.23.2005

I have begun to read "Ulysses"...

--Posted by a. on Friday, September 23, 2005.

Today, whilst working at my job at the library, I had to fix the book "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by David J. Griffiths.

In honor of the occasion, I present a few quotes...

"The more precise a wave's position is, the less precise its wavelength, and vice versa. That's why a piccolo player must be right on pitch, whereas a double-bass player can afford to wear garden gloves."

"If your amplitude is greater than a/2, go directly to jail."

"Compute [p]. (As Peter Lorre would say, "do it the kveek vay, Johnny!"

"I have to warn you that although everybody uses it, this is lousy notation. For [alpha] and ß are not vectors, ... they are labels - serial numbers ("F43A-96T") or names ("Charlie")."

"To the layperson, the philosopher, or the classical physicist, a statement of the form "this particle doesn't have a well-definied position" sounds vague, incompetent, or (worst of all) profound. It is none of these."

"I would be delinquent if I failed to mention the archaic nomenclature for atomic states, because all chemists and most physicists use it (and the people who make up the Graduate Record Exam love this kind of thing.)"

"The result is recorded as the following hieroglyph:"

--Posted by s. on Friday, September 23, 2005.

9.19.2005

Ahoy there, Mateys....

--Posted by s. on Monday, September 19, 2005.

9.17.2005

Did we really need a scientific study to show that preschoolers are more likely to pretend they are buying cigarettes if their parents were smokers?

--Posted by s. on Saturday, September 17, 2005.

9.16.2005

Oh, Grinnell..

How thou dost epitomize socially awkward situations.

--Posted by s. on Friday, September 16, 2005.

9.15.2005

A logic problem:

18: If the world is a progressively realized community of intrepretation, then either quadruplicity will drink procrastination or, provided that the Nothing negates, boredom will ensue seldom more often than frequently.

Thanks a bunch, Mr. Kalish.

--Posted by s. on Thursday, September 15, 2005.

And now for Judge John Roberts two favorite movies:
1)Dr Zhivago
2)North by Northwest
(I'm learning to like this guy)

--Posted by a. on Thursday, September 15, 2005.

9.13.2005

Pete?

--Posted by s. on Tuesday, September 13, 2005.

Gosh, if I ever have a career I hope it advances quickly, just like soon-to-be (perhaps) Chief Justice John Roberts.

--Posted by s. on Tuesday, September 13, 2005.

9.12.2005

I'm going to burn up someday. And it's gonna be because I stay inside during a fire alarm and type things on the blog. And plans. Etc.

Oh, kids these days.

The New Oxyd

It's not quite the same, but it will have to do.

--Posted by s. on Monday, September 12, 2005.

9.09.2005

Aargh..

This week has been short on sleep, and this weekend has been long in coming.

The academic atmosphere is intense, but exciting; the social life ("night life", if you will), is marvelous. So if Grinnell were all about the friends and the homework, I don't think that it would too stressful. But that's not the only part - there's also the politics.

All the political maneuvering that goes on around here sort of takes it out of me. It's a little bit the democrat/republican/libertarian/anarchist/etc. groups on campus, and a little bit SGA and the college adminstration and such. I'd much rather think about semiotics, or Russian literature, or, I don't know, fishing or something.

Also, today I when I was answering a first year about my major, I had to argue quite a while to convince him that computer science was in fact a valid part of cognitive science. (And not just "cognitive scientists don't study computer science" - but he actually told me that comp.sci was completely irrelevant..."I just don't think there's really a connection there.") I am used to explaining my major - and am more than happy to do so, to people that don't know and are interested. But when someone first asks for a definition and then proceeds to talk as if they know more than I do about the field, it makes me sad. I know that I'm not that far advanced, but I've invested a lot of time and energy in this "little project" - developing a list of required classes, finding advisors (both official and peripheral), researching what cog.sci programs look like at schools where they do offer undergrad degrees in the field, planning individual research projects, talking to the one other indie cog.sci major that is here, and even looking at after-graduation options (grad school? research? move to montana and raise rutabagas?).
So, dear person, what are you majoring in? Political "Science"? Sociology? ART HISTORY!?!? What background do you have to tell me everything that I don't know about MY subject?
I don't get a chance to shine any too often. Let me have this one - I think I've worked for it.

I don't know why I got so worked up over that one...
(I suppose I could switch to English. Will I need computer science for that one?)

--Posted by s. on Friday, September 09, 2005.

9.08.2005

"The only thing I can say to that is, well, it's entirely irrelevant."

(I love it when professors lose their tact...)

--Posted by s. on Thursday, September 08, 2005.

You know, a lot of stuff happened to day.
Sid Caeser was born.
The Miss America contest was first held.
The Pledge of Allegiance was first printed.
St. Augustine was etablished.
New Amsterdam became New York.

--Posted by a. on Thursday, September 08, 2005.

9.07.2005

I am slightly aggravated that my above-average (if i may say so myself) ability to visualise/comprehend/understand basic, fundamental, abstract mathematical concepts does not seem to be translating into an ability to get a correct answer when specifics are thrown in to the problem.

(or, in five words, math is better without numbers.)

--Posted by s. on Wednesday, September 07, 2005.

9.05.2005

"It is basically absurd to argue: How in the now can I know of a not-now, since I cannot compare the not-now which no longer is with the now (that is to say, the memory image present in the now)? As if it pertained to the essence of memory that an impage present in the now were presupposed for another thing similar to it, and as with graphic representation, I could and must compare the two."

-Edmund Husserl, Internal Time Consciousness

How esoteric can you get? I have 25 pages of this stuff to get through, (and, preferably, understand)

I'm...enough of a geek to enjoy it, though.

--Posted by s. on Monday, September 05, 2005.

9.04.2005

Things that annoy me:

When someone responds to the question "What are you doing" (either asked or implied) with an -ing form of a word that is not a verb. (i.e., homeworking, latining, calculusing, etc.)

Large groups of people.

When someone (usuallly in a classroom setting) tries to argue a point by READING (more than a phrase or a short sentence) DIRECTLY OUT OF THE ASSIGNED TEXT. I mean, come on, we've all (supposedly) read it. Paraphrase. Let the authors argue their own point. Don't try to claim their point as your own.

The use of the word "complex", as in "Sports Complex", "Health Complex", etc...

My tendency to say stupid things.

Meeting someone that I know, and I know I know, and who knows me, but who's name I can not remember, especially when they try to stop and have a conversation.

People quoting from movies or tv shows or songs that I've never heard of. (Well, actually I kind of enjoy that. It makes me feel superior. Pop culture lemmings....)

Not understanding things.

8:00 a.m. classes.

How fast my hair grows.

Having classes on labor day. (I know, white collar/blue collar. Academics don't labor. They just sit around and read each other's books.)

The question "What are you going to do after you graduate from Grinnell?"
Similarly, having to tell people what my major is, and then having to explain what my major is.

--Posted by s. on Sunday, September 04, 2005.

9.01.2005

It's a bit interesting that for BOTH of the category-five hurricanes that have caused considerable damage in my lifetime, I have been living with someone with the same name as the hurricane.

Donate.

--Posted by s. on Thursday, September 01, 2005.