John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

It is remarkable how much the story of the cover-up of the events that occurred after the failure of the Monju nuclear reactor reminds me of the plot of Kurosawa’s “The Bad Sleep Well.” The verisimiltude hereby given to Kurosawa’s tale implies something about the Japanese.

That said, the video, which can be seen at Wikileaks does not strike me as particularly scandalous. The thin layer of what I presume is salt over everything is a strange sight, but not especially fearsome.

The nation of Lithuania is considering changing its name

I have not seen many better examples lately of a proposal to make a costly change that will ultimately prove irrelevant. It will do Lithuania no good to be named differently if most Americans cannot locate it or its neighbors, such as Estonia or Latvia, on a map. Americans are indifferent to Lithuania not simply because of its name.

Determine the value of X in the analogy below:

Thulsa Doom : L. Ron Hubbard :: X : Tom Cruise

The bug I complained about on January 12, 2008 is still present in the recently updated iPhone firmware, version 1.1.3. Perhaps 1.1.4 will solve the problem.

He was continuously surprised anew by her endless hitherandthithering; moreso because he was never certain whither she went. He was not even certain that there was a definite direction — that it was not movement for movement’s sake he was watching.

Today’s weather suggests that I may have offended Poseidon recently.

As our bodies, exhausted after much travail, must rest, so too may love, compassion or forgiveness need to sleep when they have been too much taxed.

But that does not mean that they will not awake again.

Of all the shortened spellings currently popular, I think the most problematic is the use of “thou” as an alternative for “though”. I am genuinely confused by this at times when I find that I cannot parse a sentence using the assumption that “thou” means “you”.

Accordingly, it is possbile to construct the pump housing in such a manner that, in addition to the said at least approximately radial outlet, it [...]¹

The above-quoted passage shows with eminent clarity the point at which the use of the word “said” to clarify the referrent of an expression overextends itself in the English language and leads to confusion, rather than to exactitude.

Legal language would benefit tremendously from the incorporation of a discovery Descartes made several hundred years ago in mathematics: the use of readily distinguished symbolic variables makes it easier to express complex thoughts in which there is a long succession of references to distinct entities that might be otherwise confused. More generally, one should appreciate that natural human languages are not optimal tools for the expression of many thoughts.

1. U.S. Patent No. 6,100,618 : Schoeb et al. : Column 3 : Lines 56-58↩

One of my main frustrations with the 1.1.2 firmware on the iPhone is that the ability to select from multiple e-mail addresses for a single contact while composing a message is an illusion: the e-mail is always sent to the e-mail currently highlighted when you view the contact regardless of other attempts to override this. Possibly, though I have not confirmed this, the selected e-mail address is reset during synchronization with Address Book.