Note: This blog has been deprecated, because the system it's built upon (MovableType) was comment-spammed to the point of destabilization. This URL now exists for archival purposes. Trying to add a comment to an old entry will not work here; however, the entries do exist at my blog's current manifestation, here, and comments do work (and I'm still very happy to read them, if you're so kind to leave them).
A couple weeks ago, at a viola lesson, Anne (my teacher) and I were just in a screw-off, tangential mood. My ring finger at some point in a scale slipped and hit a flat note, and Anne noted this: "Careful with your third finger, I heard a B-Flarp come out of that."
"A B-Flarp?"
"You know, not exactly flat, but not exactly sharp..."
"Oh! Ok, I'll watch out for that. ...*snicker* ah, B-Flarp...I'll remember that one well, because the alternative was a subject of almost-heated debate over a past participle in English last year."
"Huh? (...*click*) Oh. Well, I guess that is a tricky one, along with the other Seven Words You Can't Say on Television..."
On a (believe it or not) related topic, my essay on Cummings (sorry, ":cummings;{)?!") is due tomorrow, and I'm doing some last-minute research for the final draft. I'm at 20 of a 24-page essay, and I've discovered this wonderful past participle (it's a .pdf, so I'll quote):
The unusual but etymologically correct past tense of shit was another possibility: "on him they shat / they shat encore" (440).
Now, I can say shat and have it be academically supported. College kicks ass, in much cacafuego producing quantities.
On a closing note, I got the title of this entry from the same page on that essay I'm reading: cummings had to disguise the word 'shit' from a censory wave in order to publish his poems. He substituted 'merde,' 'Olaf,' 'delete,' and 'kaka' to hide from the editing bastard-presses, the last of which refers to the Spanish term "shitfire." I shat ye not.
Gahhh.
Due in: 13 hours and ten minutes.
One paragraph of Gahhh.
Poetic review, and I can't even find a Cummings poem that I could carry on for a whole paper about.
I refuse to say I'm screwed; come three o'clock, if there's still just one paragraph of Gahhh, I'll clench my teeth and start the aforementioned s-word.
Why couldn't cummings just have been a sexist, or a bigot, instead of a respected poet...easy opinions can come on those topics. As a note on the latter of frownable thoughts, I'm regretting not having chosen Thomas Jefferson as my essay topic.
C'est la vie.
Well, there've been plenty of things done with the marvelous number pi by mathematicians. They've tried to calculate it with right triangles in a circle shrinking to lines (Egyptians), they've made a movie about it ("Pi"), they've lined their Calculus BC poster's report segment with the digits in gold (Madge Dodgson), and some have even tried to calculate it to a million digits with the series for ArcTangent.
I found it to a million digits with a few keystrokes in Mathematica. Yay. The notebook file's a little over a megabyte, too...
Anyways, I decided to have fun with pi. I took the first sixty-nine digits of pi (I started with 50, but in copying and pasting 19 more digits got added on somehow) and started making lines of numbers as long as the first digit of that line. (0's are ignored as line beginnings)
There is a tie in this to what I've been doing, and will continue to do, for the rest of this weekend: e.e. cummings (with his name capitalized as he would've wanted it). I've been reading this guy's poetry, and as a heavily logic-set person, he drives me nuttier than pi would ever be able to.
I'll give an example, taken from published complete collection of his poems (and I'll try to keep the line spacing authentic as well):
so little he is
so.
Little
ness be
(ing)
comes ex
-pert-
Ly expand:grO
w
i
?n
g
Is poet iS
(childlost
so;ul
)foundclown a
-live a
,bird
!O
& j &
ji
&
jim,jimm
;jimmy
s:
A
V
o(
.
:
;
,
(I kid ye not) From poems like this, one half in French, I became inspired to play with pi. Damn, I miss logic.
In response to Cassie's comment on Leah's 'future' blog (I never learned HTML linking or TrackBack, sorry):
Heh, I'll start that gauntlet off with a weeding. I'll stand at the front gate, heavily cloaked, and demand:
"What is your name?"
"What is your quest?"
"What is the sum of all integers from 1 to n?"
The first person to give n(n+1)/2 gets to go through the gauntlet (which will probably just be going up a kiddy slide's stairs, going down the slide, and avoiding a tub full of baked beans at the bottom) to get to the front door. Or, a truly clever student who gives me "Wait, all integers to what power?" gets my to-be fantastic lecture on whatever topic he/she so desires.
...I still wanna have that math TV show on public access...