php hit counter The Everpresent Wordsnatcher: October 2005
“you mean you have other words?” cried the bird happily. “well, by all means, use them.”

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

A Logic Puzzle

Eric, Chris, Jeff and Sung-woo share an apartment with two bedrooms. Chris and Jeff are sound sleepers; Eric and Sung-woo are light sleepers. Eric, Chris, and Jeff snore. Chris snores louder than Eric, and Jeff snores louder than Eric and Chris. Jeff and Sung-woo go to work early. Sung-woo is sick and really just wants to get one good night's sleep. Chris has constructed an elaborate sound barrier between Sung-woo and Eric, to no avail. Jeff has spent most of the discussion laughing hysterically.

Where should each roommate sleep, what time should they go to bed and wake up, and how many nights of experimental sleeping arrangements will it take before everyone decides to make Jeff sleep outside?

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Moving On

my university has forsaken me. alas, this trusty webspace will soon be as the morning mist by noontide forgotten. and so, just as i left my stanford mail for gmail, so do i leave the stanford domain for the blogspot domain. at this rate, soon my whole life will be owned by google. well, as long as they keep giving it to me for free...

anyway, the point is that, as the error page should tell you for a while, you should now look for me at wordsnatcher.blogspot.com. actually, this blog will be at wordsnatcherblog.blogspot.com, but you get the idea. i may shuffle things around a bit within the wordsnatcher*.blogspot.com family, but you should always be able to find your way from the main page.

while i'm on the subject, do any of y'all pay any attention to my non-blog pages? i'm particularly trying to decide whether it's worth the effort to find a way to bring over my papers and music. i may let that stuff also go the way of the morning mist by noontide forgotten. we'll see.

Friday, October 07, 2005

Q-tips and Science

The instructions on the box of cotton swabs in our bathroom begin: "Hold swab firmly and use a soft touch". That's rather poetic.

Ran into Chris this morning, which was unusually early for him (he works at a Stanford bio research lab). He explained, "I have a meeting at nine. Journal club. It's like Bible study for scientists. Early in the morning."

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

On Choosing

This post is the sort of thing you've heard before, especially if you've talked much with Eric Lowe, but it bears repeating. It comes from C.S. Lewis's Perelandra (that is, that's how it comes to me; it certainly doesn't originate there):
"What you have made me see," answered the Lady, "is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before--that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished--if it were possible to wish--you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other."

In the rest of Perelandra Lewis sets that principle up as the cornerstone of his theory of freedom and of sin: I cling to the good thing I'm not given, and in choosing the imagined thing I destroy the good of the actual thing I'm given. That bears thinking on.

(Just before that passage there's another good quotable: "The sense of precariousness terrified him: but when she looked at him again he changed the word to Adventure, and then all words died out of his mind." Well, so be it.)