Political Musings...

There's always this question, if someone -- say, George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson -- ran for president of the US today, would they win?

( Thinking Aloud... )

Political Musings...

There's always this question, if someone -- say, George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson -- ran for president of the US today, would they win?

( Thinking Aloud... )

Amusing myself at work...

My friend Shoshe leant me a summary she did of some Voyager-era papers I'm reading that she did for a term paper last spring. Not only does she mention me in the Acknowledgments for explaining something to her, one of the citations is (B. Stareyes*, private communication), because I told her a picture had never been taken of a ring particle, unless you count the moons Pan and Daphnis.

* Okay, so it was my real first initial and last name, but I try not to give out my real name on this blog.

Also, thanks to Elizabeth Bear's blog (matociquala), I got this link -- English without all the non-Germanic words. It really shows how much modern vocabulary is dependent on Greek and Latin derived words. Reminds me of an essay I was reading a couple of days ago, by Richard Feynman about his trip to Brazil. He noted that speaking science in Portuguese is easy, since both English and Portuguese use a lot of Latin, and the modifications mostly follow the same patterns, so he could quickly convert a term in English to a term in Portuguese. Speaking conversational Portuguese was harder, since English was more Germanic in that sense, and languages in general tend to borrow less at that level.

It also makes me want to develop Darynese's (my constructed language) science vocabulary. Knowing the history of science helps here, since it explain why we named things what we did -- for example, electron comes from the Greek word for amber, since the first electrical systems were created through static electricity on glass and amber. (It's why the electronics in Lyra's world His Dark Materials are known as amberics -- same etymology, but a different language to give it that alternate-history flair).

Amusing myself at work...

My friend Shoshe leant me a summary she did of some Voyager-era papers I'm reading that she did for a term paper last spring. Not only does she mention me in the Acknowledgments for explaining something to her, one of the citations is (B. Stareyes*, private communication), because I told her a picture had never been taken of a ring particle, unless you count the moons Pan and Daphnis.

* Okay, so it was my real first initial and last name, but I try not to give out my real name on this blog.

Also, thanks to Elizabeth Bear's blog (matociquala), I got this link -- English without all the non-Germanic words. It really shows how much modern vocabulary is dependent on Greek and Latin derived words. Reminds me of an essay I was reading a couple of days ago, by Richard Feynman about his trip to Brazil. He noted that speaking science in Portuguese is easy, since both English and Portuguese use a lot of Latin, and the modifications mostly follow the same patterns, so he could quickly convert a term in English to a term in Portuguese. Speaking conversational Portuguese was harder, since English was more Germanic in that sense, and languages in general tend to borrow less at that level.

It also makes me want to develop Darynese's (my constructed language) science vocabulary. Knowing the history of science helps here, since it explain why we named things what we did -- for example, electron comes from the Greek word for amber, since the first electrical systems were created through static electricity on glass and amber. (It's why the electronics in Lyra's world His Dark Materials are known as amberics -- same etymology, but a different language to give it that alternate-history flair).