“Are you writing me a love letter?”<\/p>\n
I stopped typing the email that I was working on and looked up at my wife.<\/p>\n
“Um, no. I was replying to an email from Mom about using robot swarms as soldiers.”<\/p>\n
Now, my wife knows me well enough that there is a high likelihood that I am serious when I said that. I was. I am a wise-ass too, but robot swarms wouldn’t be the punch line to one of my gags. (Robot swarms are very serious.)<\/p>\n
“You guys are definately different. And you are all the same.” Interesting statement. I disagreed, although I have picked up enough at this point to recognize 1) what she means by same, 2) what I mean by same, and 3) we look at the “same” thing differently. <\/p>\n
What I immediately thought was something along the lines of: well, we are different heights, hair color, and even genders. The similarities in things like gait and facial structure are small enough that I have heard comments about others thinking we weren’t siblings at first. The tastes in subject matter are way different. Nope, not the same.<\/p>\n
What she meant was that we all have a wide net in what interests us, a very analytical outlook, and extremely curious natures. If we come across something that doesn’t fall in the natural category of “oh, I am so into that,” we will still pay attention and ask questions. In that case, same.<\/p>\n
Which I have to agree with. I would put the term as “similar” not “same.” Clones, no. Intellectual comrades-in-arms, yes.<\/p>\n
Later, I was installing a RSS aggregator on my PC. I should have done this a while ago. The list of blogs and news items that I try to keep up with is well beyond the point of being able to have a few bookmarks that I check up on. Right away I was able to put most of the sites into the aggregator. And away I went.<\/p>\n
Of course, now that I am moving these sites of interest into the aggregator, I have a chance to see a totality of my interests, albiet a totality of my blog interests. (Newsletters and the like are not included in the aggregator as I get them via email.) So I can see what interests me from a different perspective. After all, when things come in a trickle, it is hard to estimate the whole population. And if I am just poking around to one or two places at time that I can think of off the top of my head, that doesn’t capture the summation of all the sites that I have thought “hmm, have to check this out again.”<\/p>\n
So what interests me? Jewish themed blogs are far and away the biggest area. The individual focus might roam a bit over the idealogical map; some are observant, some not, and some are in between. It is interesting to get a feel for different parts of The Tribe.<\/p>\n
Technology is another area. Well, that figures. I am a technically oriented person and do so love the science. Or most of it. I really don’t have the patience for, say, sociology unless it’s framed in terms of Complexity and Emergence. As opposed to my sister, who is a sociologist, which supports my take on the above thinking of “not same.” (There’s the gender difference too, but we’ll ignore that as a “duh.”)<\/p>\n
One thing that did pique my curiousity is the number of blogs about language. Which might seem odd at first, since I am the first to admit that I have a limited grasp of English. Oh, I can speak it. I know what the individual words and ideas mean. If the grammer is wrong, I “know” it only because it sounds wrong, not that I can point out “that thingy can’t follow the whoisit since the something is over there.” But I have never quite fully understood it. Frankly, it baffles the hell out of me.<\/p>\n
This has always been the case with me. Spelling as a child was a nightmare. Basically, brute force and rote recitation were what I used to make it far enough through school for spell checkers to be invented. Although, by then I had graduated into college, but still.<\/p>\n
Now, since I don’t “get it,” but I use it daily to communicate, how is it that I understand anything? Obviously, the letters in certain combinations are meaningful, but what makes that so? How is it that we are able to convey information with these combinations in such a way that they are, for the most part, always understandable? And why is it that I can’t see the rules that are in play?<\/p>\n
An example: Poems are collections of words. Haiku is short enough for my discussion and cool enough to have a definition of how long it can be. So, in theory, I can write a program to make a haiku. <\/p>\n
Let’s say we make a list of words and say to the computer “pick a random 5 syllables, then another random 7, then another random 5.” Poof! Instant haiku, right? No, we get things like “Behavior Green Was \/ Dispensing Crash Consider \/ Column Feircely Has.” Crap. We can tweek it a little to make something like “Green Ideas Sleep Furiously,” but the point is syntax matters to make the ideas presentable. And the “rules” of syntax baffle me. <\/p>\n
So language for me is a puzzle, an intellectual challenge, and one that I relate back to information science a lot. Even though I have a hard time with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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