Wednesday, January 12, 2005
I've now done the blogkeeping I said I would do a while back. Someone could have reminded me. Incidentally, just how many different incarnations is that guy [follow the chain] going to have? Lesson for today: Tinker not.
Said he who is wondering if that bracket stuff in the name is really necessary. I have been writing this blog for a fair while, and thus far anyhoo completely trounces anyway in terms of recognition. Anyhoo hovers somewhere around the top of Google's list (and a fair chunk of the other results are things mentioning me), yet a search for anyway brings up nothing but umpteen variations on Whose line is it anyway? [Wherefore art thou
So the bracket thing serves no purpose, but I have yet to delete it. I am not sure why. Possibly because it emphasises the fact that anyhoo was a second choice name (I could simply have changed the title and not the address, but that really would confuse people). It also suggests that under normal circumstances I would never use the word anyhoo1.
It seems odd to have been doing this for long enough to have archives in three different years. But then someone recently asked how long ago I had done X (which I thought had been fairly recently) and I was a bit surprised to find I needed two hands to work it out.
How time flies. Although actually if it did then it wouldn't quite so much. But this only works if one assumes that flight involves movement (or greater movement than that of the observer), which I think is a fair assumption. Wow, managing wedge a piece of Einstein's special theory of relativity into some particularly indulgent navel-gazing2. Surely there must be some award for the misapplication of science.
By the way, how did I miss that Einstein was the person who figured out Brownian motion? There's not much more to this thought, only my brother mentioned it, due to all the IoP stuff, and I realised I had always assumed that a certain Mr Brown [not the Paddington one] had found it out. Obviously he only descried and described it, and was unable to explain it.
Oooh, I am almost getting up to a theme. Yesterday I somehow managed to work in a reference to time travel, today I find myself pondering time dilation (it happens when time falls in love, or enters a dark room).
From the EY website:
It takes the energy output of at least one power station to keep the traffic lights in the British Isles operating.Typical. That's exactly the sort of thing accountants would point out. Next they'll be saying all junctions should be roundabouts, and quoting bits of Radiohead. Eh? Not the ramming speed EY? Oh.
Also:
Men are six times more likely to be struck by lightning than women.It can't just be that they are taller on average, can it?
I was going to conclude this post by mentioning the various biological posts on Language Log, which is the only place on the web to feature longer sentences than I habitually use. But thinking of them made me think of panhagglety, and I have just realised I have not eaten, so am going to do that now. But LL's whale stuff from before Christmas was quite interesting.
And all this little science fest was triggered by Neil at GfB linking to a paper peppered with gene names which look like they have been Rot-13'ed. Which of course I have not quite read yet. Involuntary response to seeing that dreaded D. word, you see. My sinuses still bear, if not the scars, then probably a few corpses.
Anyhoo,
1: Oddly I have varying degrees of any-ness. Anyway is for use in conversations to stop people digressing or deviating, and keeping them on subject. Anyhow is used to the same effect, but is a bit blunter, often carrying the slight suggestion that I wish you would bloody well get on with it. Anyhoo is used rarely, and usually only whenever I want to change the subject. [Up].
2: (If I am upright and perpendicular to the exterior surface of a near-spherical rotating body, which is moving at a fair whack, then how much faster are my eyes moving than my navel? And therefore, how much younger is my navel than my eyes?). [Up].
