It started on cable tv (in a commercial) and ended in England’s industrial Midlands (with birds — wrens and a finch — and a museum). All to cook eggs.
The egg patrol: plastic to porcelain
May 20, 2018Rolling pin
May 19, 2018Today’s morning name. I’m baffled as to what might have dredged this compound noun (for an ordinary kitchen utensil) out of my unconscious, but there it is.
(#1) A particularly handsome rolling pin (wooden roller style) from The Ceramic Shop
The 6-fold way
May 19, 2018A fabulous design from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky yesterday:
(#1) “6-fold” (or: “The 6-fold Way”)
To come. On 6-fold symmetry: snowflakes (natural and in paper), many monocot flowers, Kekulé’s carbon ring for benzene, the major colors of the color wheel (reproduced in the rainbow flag for Gay Pride).
Then on number, color, and gender parallelisms, which will give us 6 as purple and queer. And how the opposition of the secondary hues green with purple in #1 parallels the opposition of the primary hues blue with red (and, in the background of #1, the opposition of the primary hues red with yellow).
And on the name 6-fold way, adapted from the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism and Murray Gell-Mann’s adaptation of the idea (under the name The Eightfold Way) to a theory organizing subatomic particles.
What have you done with your life? The LGBT department
May 18, 2018It began a little while back with a request from the Daily Beast for an interview in a series about “unsung (or, at least undersung) LGBT heroes” — people of significance in both a professional field and the LGBT world. A daunting request, to which I’ve responded in three postings on this blog:
on 5/9, “The way I write now”: about my eccentric genre of flânerie
on 5/10, “What have you done with your life?”: about my contributions to linguistics, via a huge list of things I’ve worked on in my academic career, plus two lists of characteristic terminology I’ve used, some of which has become associated with me personally
and now this one, about my contributions to the lgbt community. There’s some straightforward institutional stuff, and then it runs off into the weeds about my speaking out in a way that makes me highly visible and so a possible model for others.
Balls on the N + N compound watch
May 18, 2018In today’s Dilbert, Catbert persecutes Dilbert (as Alice looks on):
(#1)
N + N compounds are notorious for the wide range of interpretations available for them: what’s the semantic relationship between head N2 and modifier N1? As above, where the choice is between ‘ref(N2) relieves, reduces ref(N1)’ (the reading for a conventionalized compound stress ball and many others, like headache pill) and ‘ref(N2) causes ref(N1)’ (as in death ray) — where for an expression X, ref(X) is the referent of X.
Glycoscience in the Royal Society of London
May 18, 2018… and, oh yes, women.
In the Stanford Report (the daily faculty-staff news release) yesterday, a bulletin (by Kate Lewis) from the School of Humanities and Sciences, “Carolyn Bertozzi elected to Royal Society: Carolyn Bertozzi, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, has been elected as one of this year’s ten new Foreign Members to the Royal Society for her pioneering work in the field of bioorthogonal chemistry”:
(Photo: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service)
Bertozzi’s current research focus is in the field of glycoscience, the study of sugars on cell surfaces. As a self-described “glycoscience-lifer,” Bertozzi said she hopes that the “integration of all my contributions somehow elevates the visibility of the glycoscience field, which can have real benefits to human health,” including understanding the role sugars play in the development of cancer and inflammation.
trigger finger
May 16, 2018I had this affliction, for about three months. It involved myalgia — that’s the name of the symptom, muscle pain — that limited my movements, produced frequent nasty cramps in several parts of my body, made me miserable and depressed. Among the affected muscles were those in my fingers, which cramped up painfully without warning. Especially my ring finger (third finger, left hand).
Eventually, it was seen to be a side effect of the very powerful statin drug I was taking (for blood pressure and cholesterol control), generic atorvastatin, trade name Lipitor, a very powerful statin prescribed at maximum dose. Which was breaking down muscle fibers. Essentially, I was being poisoned by one of my medicines.
That’s now over — I went off the Lipitor three months ago and recently started small doses of the steroid prednisone for symptomatic relief — and I feel very much better, but an odd effect remains. My ring finger occasionally gets stuck in a bent position. No pain, no swelling or anything, just stuck, as here:
(#1) Stuck bent finger (workdesk spathiphyllum plant as background)
I can push it back with my other hand, and it makes a little pop! as it resumes its normal working position.
It’s called trigger finger, fancy name tenosynovitis. And it has nothing to do with the Lipitor poisoning.
There oughta be a word
May 16, 2018Darya Kavitskaya on Facebook yesteday:
This is sour cherry clafoutis. No more food for today.
I commented:
I think French needs a verb clafouter ‘to cook a clafoutis; to devour a clafoutis’.
Come to think of it, I could use an English verb clafoute /kla’fut/ with these senses:
I think I’ll clafoute for tonight’s dessert. Maybe plum.
Terry piggishly clafouted. Seven at a sitting!
To come: a reminder about what clafoutis is; about the forms of the invented French verb clafouter; on “having no word for” some concept; about needing — or at least wanting — a word for it; about the ambiguity of these invented verbs (both ‘to cook’ and ‘to eat’); about the source of such ambiguities in marker-poor combinations of elements (lacking explicit indicators of the semantic relationship between the elements — there’s nothing in French clafouter or English clafoute to indicate the semantic role of the referent of their subjects, as creator or consumer); and about the motivation for marker-poor combinations, in a drive for brevity (vs. clarity). French and English could be clearer, less ambiguous — I’ll illustrate with still more invented French verbs — but only at the cost of greater length and effort.
All this from (delicious) French sour cherry flan.
Surreal beer
May 16, 2018Today’s Bizarro/Wayno collaboration goes to the neighborhood taproom:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
There’s the question of why Toper 3 can’t find his beer. That has a simple answer: the apple obscures his vision.
Then there’s the claim that Toper 3 is a surrealist — but actually he’s a surrealist character, not a surrealist (an exponent of surrealism). That does make the cartoon surreal, bizarre, because it juxtaposes two ordinary topers at a bar with a fictional character (one from surrealist art, to make the scene more delicious).