Erik's Blog

Today I stumbled on this awesome speech written and given by Michael Crichton back in 2002 about speculation, and how the media – which he defines as movies, television, internet, books, newspapers, and magazines – is, to a large extent, a gurgling blob of useless drivel. It’s a shame that he probably didn’t get to watch much of the farcical climax of vacuous speculation that was the 2008 US presidential election, as he died on the day Obama got elected. My favorite part of the article is how he talks about the fallacy that we all commit (a recent favorite topic of mine) when we read the newspaper, or receive information from any news source for that matter.
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Recently a small shop in town selling decorative housewares, that had been there for the entire four years we’ve lived here, went out of business. While it was always interesting to look into their shop window, I think I only went in once, and the shopkeeper wasn’t very pleasant, so nothing was purchased. The shop was on a prime corner right in the center of town. I can’t think of a better location for a shop in town. So of course I was pretty curious as to who would jump on that choice piece of real estate. It was empty for a couple weeks, and then the painting started.
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Recently I’ve been particularly enjoying living in a small town. Many of the shopkeepers and bartenders know me, most not by name, and even some not by nationality, but they all say hello and some of the bartenders will even start preparing my drink when they see me enter.
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Ever since recently being lured by the siren song of Lisp, I’ve been having some seriously bizarre dreams. Lisp, for me, is paralyzingly flexible. It allows for so many programming styles that when I sit down to start using it to tackle a problem, I have no idea where to begin. It’s like sitting down at a restaurant and having a menu with 500 items on it. It’s paralyzing. Choice makes humans miserable.
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This is an idea that’s been rattling around my brain for some time. It involves how we talk about large sums of money. The past year has seen banking system and government bailout news stories that often reference millions and billions and trillions of dollars. I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one that has trouble grasping the difference between large quantities when they are thrown out quickly by a news reporter. The famous web comic, XKCD, as it often does, hit the nail right on the head some time ago.
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One difference between the US and Spain – and the rest of Europe, I think – is the practice of tipping in restaurants and bars. In the US, tipping is such a common custom that the waiters’ salaries are reduced, sometimes below minimum wage, under the assumption that the tips that they make will put them back over the minimum wage. In Spain, waiters are paid at least minimum wage, and there is no tipping whatsoever. None. If the check comes and it says 4.80€, you put down a 5€ bill and you wait for the change to come back. That’s the norm. I submit to you that the European system of non-tipping is inherently superior to the American system of tipping.
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internauta: n. a user of the internet.

Just like an astronaut navigates the stars (still only figuratively, unfortunately), an internauta navigates the complex network of tubes connected computers collectively known as The Internet. The threshold to be considered an internauta is more or less being able to send and read email and watch a video on YouTube. I mainly hear the term on the television news when talking about users of a certain website.
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One tough grammatical hurdle for English speakers learning Spanish, or vice versa, is the word “people”. In English it’s plural, and in Spanish it’s singular (la gente). I still find myself incorrectly conjugating verbs when “people” is the subject. e.g. La gente están contentos esta noche.
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If monkeys ever developed a system of crime fighting, or if we hadn’t lost our opposable big toe, their fingerprint database would need toeprints as well. Otherwise the killers would just use their feet to hold the murder weapon.

The above was conceived while watching my daughter grasp her own feet together like Mr. Burns does with his hands. I always think, “Exxxxcellent…” when she does it.
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Recently my blogrollmate, Sharon, pointed me to this fascinating article, which you should read all the way through, entitled How Does Language Shape The Way We Think?. It highlights something I’ve noticed in my lingual trek into Spanish: that to properly speak another language, you must change the way you see the world. Because of the organic way that languages have formed, the constructs of various languages inherently contain extra information that is missing from other languages, information that is not thought about by non-speakers. It’s mastering these new understanding of the world around you that are the hardest part of learning another language.
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