State of everything

Craig Ferguson thinks everything sucks:



Louis CK thinks everything's amazing:

"Everything is amazing and nobody is happy"
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I agree with them both.

"Microblogging site Twitter"

Sometimes when news articles refer to Twitter, the first mention describes it as "microblogging site Twitter".

Is there anyone - even one single person in the world - who knows what microblogging is but doesn't know what Twitter is?

I did hear of microblogging in passing before I became familiar with Twitter, but the concept didn't make sense to me. Then, later on, when I found out that various famous people I want to stalk like and admire were tweeting, I went and checked out their Twitter feeds and from that got a sense of what Twitter is. And from this, I groked the concept of microblogging.

But there has been no point in my internet experience where my concept of what Twitter is could ever have been clarified by describing it as a "microblogging site."

Things Sleeptracker Should Invent: "I'm going to bed now" button

I've been playing with a Sleeptracker recently. I might post a more comprehensive review later, but my preliminary assessment based on the first couple of tries is that it does what it says it does.

However, there is one thing that annoys me. If you want it to track the quality of your sleep during the night (rather than just waking you up at an optimal time), you have to set a "to bed" time, i.e. tell it in advance what time you're going to bed. Setting the "to bed" time involves as much fussy button-pressing as setting an alarm time on a regular digital watch, which is annoying because I don't go to bed at the same time every night and despite my best efforts never end up in bed at the time I planned to - which is why I need a Sleeptracker to wake me up in the first place. So this means that if I want to track my sleep quality, I have to fuss with buttons and set the time just before I go to bed every single night. Not especially user-friendly, and probably won't be something I can keep up in the long term.

What I'd like to be able to do is press one button (or one button sequence) to tell the tracker "I'm going to bed right now." Then it automatically sets the "to bed" time as whatever the current time is. Surely we have the technology to do that?

Happy International Translation Day!

As ever, using Fête St-Jerôme as an excuse to post an Eddie Izzard bootleg*




*(Dear Eddie: Massive, massive respect for your ever-increasing awesomeness and I'mma let you finish, but if you'd bring your tour to Canada we wouldn't need all these bootlegs.)

Teach me eBay etiquette

I emailed an ebay seller asking how much shipping to Canada would cost. Seller quotes an amount, I bid accordingly and win. Then I get a standard "YAY, you won!" email from the seller quoting a shipping price that's 20% higher.

The item ended up selling for close to my upper bid, so this 20% higher shipping price is enough to tip it from "cheaper than retail" to "more expensive than retail."

I already sent the seller a polite email asking WTF, but if they won't lower the shipping price back to their originally quoted amount, is there any way I can cancel the transaction without incurring any sort of penalty? I don't even particularly want the seller to get any penalty, I just don't want to buy the thing if shipping is 20% higher.

Update: Seller corrected it with no drama, all is good.

How to teach financial literacy in high school without changing the curriculum

A recurring theme during this recession is that they should teach financial literacy in high school. Of course, adding mandatory courses isn't that simple. There's only room for so many courses over the four years, there are all kinds of other courses that people want to be made mandatory, and there still has to be room for people to take electives like French and Physics and History all the way through to Grade 12.

So here's what we do: make every single word problem in the textbooks about a financial literacy concept, whenever mathematically possible.

For example, one thing I learned in one of my high school math classes was the formula for compound interest. M = P(1 + i)^n. I still use it to this day when trying to plan my personal finances. However, every word problem we had on this concept was about earning interest on investments. They could quite easily have made some of the word problems about credit card interest. Same mathematical concept, same word problem, but now you've taught how credit card interest works, which is one of the concepts people are complaining that they don't teach in high school.

Apparently calculus is used in economics similarly to how it's used in physics. I don't know enough about economics to know how this works. (And I find it SO WEIRD that so artificial a concept as economics would follow the mathematical laws of the physical universe.) But they could have taught this quite easily with a sentence or two about how calculus is used in economics, followed by some economics-based word problems. Then everyone who takes calculus will know a bit about economics. They did that with physics - I learned about derivatives and velocity and acceleration in Calculus class before I even took the relevant Physics class - so it shouldn't be any harder to do it with economics.

As an added bonus, it will make mathematics seem more relevant to students, because everyone knows you have to do money stuff when you're a grownup.

It will take some rewriting of textbooks, but that's more painless and possibly faster than rewriting the curriculum.

Real-life Things They Should Invent

Voting for Project 10 to the 100 is finally open! You can vote here!

I'm trying to decide which one to vote for. Obviously my first thought is either the one that will give the most help to the most people, or the one that would be most beneficial to me personally. But then I started wondering whether I should also be thinking about feasibility? Which of these projects can actually be achieved (or have significant progress be made) with $2 million? Which of these projects could Google actually make happen (as opposed to being dependent on external factors)? So I'm going to have to give it more thought before I vote.

You should go check out the finalists and vote too!

I had a long, difficult day of translation today

But not nearly as difficult as this guy.

This is why I hope to be able to stick to written translation for my entire career.

Only one person stopped to help

Sometimes in the Star's Acts of Kindness and other good deed stories, you there are stories where someone's in trouble and only one person stopped to help, everyone else just walked by, pretending they didn't see it.

Today I saw a lady fall down, and another lady immediately stopped to help. I didn't see any further need for help (fallen-down lady was getting up, no apparent injuries, they didn't need more people to pick up her personal effects) so I didn't linger and, to protect fallen-down lady's dignity and privacy, did my very best not to stare.

What would they have me do instead? I certainly wouldn't want a whole crowd gathering if I were the one who fell down.

The choreography of spare change

I was walking down the street, wearing a skirt and blouse (no jacket) and carrying a large purse with my raincoat draped over it. Some guy stops me (yes, actually stops me, as though he was going to ask for directions) and asks for spare change.

If I were to give him spare change, I would have to take my raincoat off my purse and shift it to the other arm, open my purse, dig out my wallet, open the change section of my wallet, and decide which change to give him.

I wonder if he seriously thought I was going to do all that?

I wonder if panhandlers ever get money - like at all ever - from people who don't have pockets with change in them?

Things They Should Invent: medical symptom word bank (for patients)

When trying to explain the value of using target language native speaker translators, or of having translation services available even to people who can function on an everyday basis in the target language, I often ask people to think of the last time they experienced medical symptoms that confused or frightened them - didn't know WTF was going on, couldn't google up a cause - and then describe these symptoms in a language other than their mother tongue. Try it, I'll wait. See? You lose nuance and feel less in control of what you're saying, and this is exacerbated when you're confused or frightened or in pain.

One of my favourite reference tools from back in the days when I did more medical translation is this sort of a cheat sheet for student clinicians in psychology. It's like a massive multiple choice test of all the things they need to be diagnosing, listing each factor/indicator, and then the adjectives that can be used to describe that factor/indicator. So mood can be euthymic, affect can be labile, etc. I did rather extensive research when I first started doing this so I am familiar with the concepts, but the vocabulary isn't always right on the tip of my tongue. I read the source text, I grok exactly what they're saying, I know there's a nice psychy word for it, but it isn't coming to me. I do have the tools and skills to look up each term individually, but it's much faster and easier to just scan my cheat sheet and suddenly "Echolalia! That's it!"

I'm thinking a similar tool could be very useful to patients whose first language isn't English (or even to children who don't know what kind of answers the doctor wants). Just a list of words that might be useful, grouped by category. Pain can be: dull, throbbing, burning, excruciating. A wound can be: open, scabbed, weeping, festering, bleeding. The vocabulary would have to be more everyday than my cheat sheet ("How are you today?" "Euthymic, yourself?"), but it would still be a huge help.

You know how it's easy to read in other languages, but really hard to talk at the level you can read at? Like (assuming you're an Anglophone) even if you don't think you speak French, you could totally figure out how to, say, buy tickets on the Juste pour rire website. But even if you do think you speak French, you couldn't get up on the stage and actually perform stand-up in French (unless you're Eddie Izzard, but we already know he's a looney.)

With this word bank tool, coming up with le mot juste to describe pain or symptoms or bodily fluids would be as easy as reading. It would be like skimming the Juste pour rire website, looking for tickets, and thinking "Hmmm, the word for "ticket" is billet so Billetterie looks like a promising link" rather than having to come up with the word billetterie all on your own. Patients could describe their symptoms in a more precise and nuanced fashion plus have a better idea of what sorts of things the doctors want them to tell them about, doctors could give them better care, and all it would take is an hour of brainstorming and a few photocopies.

Things They Should Invent: optional accent sensitivity in search engines

Some of my tools are accent-blind (i.e. they read ou and où the same) and others are accent-sensitive (i.e. they read ou and où as two different words). As a lazy Anglophone, I prefer accent blindness, but sometimes accent-sensitivity would be convenient to filter out interference.

I'd love it if we could have a checkbox to turn accent-sensitivity on or off depending on our needs.

Letter to my 18-year-old self

I just realized that it was 10 years ago that I started university. Here's some things I wish I'd known then:

- Do half an hour of homework or studying per course every day. That's all it takes. You'll be on top of everything.
- Move out of your parents' house. You'll be fine, really. And you'll prove your parents wrong about all kinds of things that they're annoying about.
- Your boss shouldn't be playing mind games with you. Your boss should be protecting you when the customers sexually harass you. Your boss shouldn't be requiring you to cash in and cash out and take out the garbage and clean the bathrooms before and after your paid shift. There are jobs available where they don't do this. You don't have to keep your job just because you have a job.
- Apply for every single on-campus job you think you might possibly be able to do. Apply for every single work placement or translation practicum you can find.
- Apartments don't have to suck. If the apartment you're looking at sucks, say no thank you and look at a different apartment.
- Prioritize living within easy walking distance of a grocery store. You don't need parks, you don't need landscaping or scenery, you don't need in-building amenities other than laundry. You do need to be able to run out and buy milk in the middle of the night if necessary.
- Don't stop reading recreationally just because you're in university. Keep your library card active and add anything that piques your interest to your holds list.
- Read Harry Potter. Read the complete works of Miss Manners. Read the In Death series. Read Introvert Advantage. Read Malcolm Gladwell. Watch Eddie Izzard's comedy and every interview he's ever done. These will all not only entertain you, but help you navigate the world better.
- Contact the second-year-entry program you're after and ask them if they have any suggestions on what you should take first year. They will actually answer your questions, and you'll be better prepared and have met some program requirements ahead of time.
- Be out about your phobias. People will help you. Get insecticide with a paper label, and have someone remove the label for you. That solves the disgusting picture problem and gives you evil death powers over the yucky things.
- Be out about your insecurities in general. Your interlocutors will compensate. In the real world, people want you to feel like you belong.
- Don't try to save money by scrimping on internet service. It will only depress you.
- Make a point of consuming more information about Canadian politics than about US politics.
- People aren't going to think you're weird if you bing off a quick email thanking them for whatever. Seriously.
- Wear skirts. Wear dresses. Wear v-neck shirts. Wear t-shirt bras. Wear teacup eyeglass frames, and buy the best lenses available. Wear necklaces. Worry about heel width, not heel height. Buy every well-fitting pair of black pants you meet. Buy two of every shirt you fall in love with. Buy black cotton knee socks. If a pair of pants fits perfectly except for gapping in the back, any competent alterationist (and often your own mother) can put darts in the back to fix that. If your feet can go all the way into the shoes but they're a bit tight around the toes, any competent shoemaker can stretch them at a very reasonable price.
- When buying a new computer, get more RAM and more disk space than you expect you would ever need.
- You can trust your money instincts. You can trust your writing voice. You can trust your research skills even if you do end up sucking at documentation class.
- If something makes you cry, stop doing/thinking about the thing that makes you cry. Distract yourself. Run up the stairwell until your thighs fill with lactic acid. Sing nasty songs at the top of your lungs. Have a drink. Eat chocolate. Go to sleep. Then revisit the crying trigger later once you've regrouped. You'll save yourself a lot of time that way.

How do minor set-backs affect self-reported happiness?

This post was triggered by, but is completely unrelated to, this Language Log post about self-reported happiness studies.

Last night my glasses broke (yes, again) in what is hopefully a minor and fixable way, yet one that requires immediate attention. So now my plans for things I have to get done this weekend all have to be shuffled around. I'm annoyed and inconvenienced and have looming over me the possibility that they might not be fixable and I might have to replace them immediately and then when I go to a wedding next weekend I'll look like an idiot with suboptimal glasses.

So if you had me do a self-reported happiness study right this minute, my happiness would come out lower than if my glasses hadn't broke. Yes, I know intellectually that they mean a broader, more long-term definition of happiness, but right at this moment the feeling of contentment seems like only a distant memory.

It would be interesting to study if things like this have an affect on happiness studies.

Pure cute

(H/T Poodle)

Currently wondering

The cool kids in high school.

You only ever heard them spoken of as Other (at least in my corner of the world and of the internet). Is there anyone in the world who feels like they actually were one of the cool kids in high school?

So sweet and so cold

I noticed recently that whenever I bite into a peach (even one that has been sitting on the counter at room temperature for several days), the inside is cold. So I tried washing a peach in warm water, but the inside was still cold when I bit into it. It has never been in a fridge, unless the farmer at the market had it in a fridge, but I bought it three days ago and it's been at room temperature ever since.

I wonder why it's cold?

Re: Caster Semenya

Just think about this, quietly and to yourself, for as long as you need to:

Are you, personally, certain that you have all the sexual organs associated with your gender and none of the sexual organs associated with the other gender? Both internally and externally? Are you sure?

Some people are sure, I know. If you've had a tubal or a c-section or exploratory surgery to diagnose the cause of your infertility, you probably know for certain. But not everyone knows for certain. I don't know for certain. I know I have breasts and a vulva, both of which appear within the range of normal to medical and intimate examination. I know I have a vagina and a cervix, or something that resembles a cervix closely enough that no doctor has ever commented upon giving me a pap smear. I know I have something the behaves enough like a uterus that it produces menstruation that is regulated with birth control pills, and stands up to the palpation part of a standard pelvic examination. I can't tell you for certain that I don't have secret internal testes. I can't tell you for certain that my uterus is fully operational (I've never been pregnant). But I'm a woman, there's no question of that. I just...am. Even if I found out I had internal testes, I'd still want to put on lipstick before leaving the house.

Can you say with absolute certainty that you have lady parts, all your lady parts, and nothing but lady parts? (Unless, of course, you have gentleman parts). If so, could you say so with equal certainty at the age of 18? If you found out tomorrow that you have some bits that aren't consistent with your gender, or are missing some bits that are usually found in your gender, would that change you? Would your sexual preferences change? Would your personal behaviour change?

Teach me about the used car market

Apparently the quality of used vehicles is improving.

Interesting! Useful, if you're in the market for a used car!

But why does the used car market exist?

I totally get why someone would buy a used car, but why do so many people want to sell their now apparently perfectly good cars? I can see how some people might want to upgrade and have the very latest thing, but I can't imagine why so many people would do it that a whole used car market would exist, and buying a used car would be commonplace rather than exceptional.

I have no frame of reference here. I've never bought or shopped for a car, my parents have always bought their cars new and used them until they died (the cars, not the parents) and no one I know has ever sold their car. So help me out. What am I missing?