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![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) hsifyppah | |
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Today's sign is orange: i or y hands circle around each other. This comes with a bonus sign: if I change the hand-shape to the I-love-you ILY shape, then it means Seanan, because I love her orangely. Yesterday's sign was FAIL, which is a K falling off a cliff basically. Hmm. More practically, I learned coffee, lactose intolerent, and POISON. There are two signs for poison in my dictionary and I love both of them. One sort of evokes the skull and crossbones and is very clear and foreboding. The second, and I like this so much, is a modified version of the sign for medication. Instead of delicately picking up medicine from your palm, you go to pick it up and the hand is stuck and wiggles a bit, maybe trying to shake its head NO. It's close to medicine, but a small difference makes it dangerous. That is pharmacy in a nutshell. One of the traditional symbols for pharmacy is a hand milking venom from a snake in to a chalice - showing that the difference between poison and medicine is the knowledge and skill of the apothecary. I am so tickled to find this expressed in the ASL signs for each.
My knee is a cranky knee. At physio on Monday and Tuesday the joint was swollen enough from working 3 days that I could straighten it less than the week before. Hmph! I took half of today off to give it a rest, but I have to work a ten tomorrow and a ten on friday. Well, in two weeks I have my ridiculous three week vacation, so that should give it a bit of a rest, depending on how hyperactive I am at Worldcon! Cedar Point! 40-fest! and Maui! Okay I'm screwed. Well, maybe I can be hyperactive sitting down. Wiggle in place. You know.
Tonight I ate a dish with cooked cauliflower and (a) it wasn't horrible, but instead (b) really tasty, and astonishingly, (c) the cauliflower was the tastiest part and I was (d) saddened when I had cherry-picked all the cauliflower bits out of it. BIZARRO-LAND! This places me in the curious position of wanting to trust advice I get from fishy (who suggested I order it,) which seems wrong somehow. He is wise and learned but utterly full of mischief and so to be treated warily. My new theory is that this was a trap designed to lull me in to a false sense of security so he can next advise me to build an igloo out of bacon lasers. Or worse, something silly.
I am slowly unpacking my room. It's SO CLOSE to the threshold beyond which it will just seem messy instead of boxed-up. My walls have squid and cockroaches and love letters on them, as walls ought to. Now I just need to mount my banjo-hooks and a person might be able to walk across the room in a straight line! Maybe. That does sound kind of boring.
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rho | |
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A few months back, someone – I forget who butI suspect it may have been phoenixdreaming – linked me to a page asking this question: what do you fear to be wrong about most?I'm not sure I particularly agree with the wording of the question. The idea is, what most shapes the way that you view the world, forming the foundation of everything else you believe, such that if some day you were to discover you were wrong your entire world-view would be shattered? The reason I don't think that it's well worded is that for me at least, the things that are most fundamental to me are the things that I fear being wrong about the least, because I'm supremely confident about them. They are the things that I have absolutely no reason to doubt. Even so, I think that it's an interesting question, and it's something that I've been thinking about on and off since I first saw it. Here's my answer: I would be most shaken to discover that I was wrong in thinking that the universe makes sense. In a way, I'm surprised that nobody in the comments on the site where I saw the question answered something along those lines. It's something that hugely fundamental to pretty much everything, I think. Imagine the alternative. Imagine that the universe doesn't make sense, and that everything that happens is completely arbitrary. I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. After all, it has done ever day of my life so far. If the universe were entirely arbitrary, though, maybe it won't. If the universe doesn't make sense then learning is impossible. We learn by making observations of the past and using them to predict what will happen in the future. I've observed lots of times that when I drop something, it falls to the floor, so I predict that if I drop something in the future it will fall to the ground and not float where it is or fall up to the ceiling. If you think about it philosophically, this is actually quite a big assumption. You can only use the past to predict the future if the universe makes sense, if it follows certain rules. Not only is this important on the fundamental level of allowing us to act with purpose and meaning, towards a goal, it is also very fundamental to the way I view the world. I'm a scientist. Not by profession or by qualification, but by the fact that the tenets of science shape the very way I think about everything. I would say that the most basic fundamental tenet of the scientific world-view is what I have just described. It is the idea that the universe makes sense and follows non-arbitrary rules. The second tenet of science is that it is possible for us to figure out what those rules are. Everything beyond that is just window dressing. To the non-scientific public at large, I think that there's a perception that science is about knowing a bunch of facts. Gravity falls off as the inverse square of distance. Evolution is caused by selection on descent with modification. The atomic number of sodium is 23. Whatever. These facts are important and useful and can give us insights or allow us to discover and create new things, but they are not the heart of science. The heart of science is the method of discovering and verifying the facts, not the facts themselves. We make observations, and we use these observations to make hypotheses, then we test these hypotheses to make further observations. If necessary, we then modify the hypothesis. This process of observation and hypothesis never stops. In science, the most important aspect of any idea isn't how we feel about it or who said it in the first place, but whether or not it's right. If some observation disproves a long-cherished theory, then the theory is thrown out. In practice, it takes a while, because you want to repeat the observation to make sure that you were really seeing what you thought you were seeing, and you want to try to figure out why the old theory worked so well for so long. But at the end of it all, when the dust settles, direct empirical evidence trumps all. A prime example of this would be quantum theory. This went against pretty much all established physics. Everything we thought we knew was wrong. Of course, in most things we can observe directly, what we thought was right gives answers so close to the answers predicted by quantum theory that it's impossible to actually measure the difference, but still. Science tells us that our best way of predicting reality is to look at reality, because reality makes sense. For this reason, in every aspect of my life, I always try to look for what is true over what is expedient, easy or convenient and I try always to be open to new ideas that challenge my existing thoughts. This is not an easy way to view life, as you often have to face up to things that you really really don't want to be true. Wishing for something not to be true doesn't make it any less true, though, and the only way to effectively deal with it – whatever it is – is to admit that it is true. To me, this is the beauty and the power of science. It applies to everything, without exception. Anything at all that we can ever encounter, we can look at it and say "ok, let's assume that there's some sort of underlying sense and pattern behind this, and then let's try to figure it out". Then if we know how something works, we can act accordingly. Forewarned is forearmed.
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jenk | |
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One of the "miracles" of modern times is that we no longer have to have fire to cook. Even if we choose a gas stove, we decide how much fire and when. This is not only safer than cooking in a fireplace, but much cooler than a cast-iron stove. In hot weather I may not always feel like a hot meal, but if I do, simply turning on the stove top to make dinner is not overly hot. The oven, on the other hand, does tend to warm the kitchen up. So does some stovetop activities, like boiling water. But in summer these can be skipped - which also says something about the variety we have available. Sure, you might miss some dishes that call for the oven, but it's a tradeoff that works most of the time. Yesterday & today were the first days in quite a while that were in the low 70s. Yesterday I made my ziti-with-rotini (big pots of boiling pasta & simmering sauce, finished in the oven) and a pan of peanut butter cookies from premade dough. Tonight was pizza. Thanks to jw1776 reminding me that tomorrow will be 80F, I baked another pan of cookies & batch of scones. ;) Tags: food, weather
Current Location: George Michael "Freedom '90"
Current Mood:  good
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admnaismith | |
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During Flail-And-Curse, the workout music segued into "Brick House", and the ever-exuberant instructor was all, "YAY! Brick House! The Ultimate wedding music!" Not sure I wanna think about that too much...anyhow, after that, it segued into "I Will Survive", and I said, "Ah! NOT the Ultimate wedding music!" ***** Later on, I was at Trader Joe's, waving goodbye to a month's worth of disposable income. A woman there was having her SQUEE moment, gaping wide-eyed at everything and making excited noises. I smiled at her, and she was all "Omigosh, I've never been to Trader Joe's before, this is SO AWESOME!!!" I said, completely deadpan, "Welcome, then, to a strange and magical place." I pointed vaguely toward the desserts. "This side will make you grow bigger." I pointed toward the pills and stuff. "And this side will make you grow smaller." She took it all in stride. A second of thought, and then, "I need the side to make me grow smaller." I said, "But remember to pick up the key first." She bounced off, happy as Adam Sandler with a trash can lid on his head. I hope I helped make her day. Current Music: Everybody Must Get Toned
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