Chicago winter

Linguistic observations that probably have a name, but I haven't gotten to researching yet

1. The suffix "-able" usually goes at the end of a verb, forming an adjective that describes the object of the verb. For example, "breakable" describes something that can be broken. However, what if the verb comes packaged with a preposition? In this case, the preposition often gets left out! At least, that's the most general pattern I can observe from these examples:
   1. A mask is breathable if you can breathe through it.
   2. A fact is Remarkable if you can remark on it.
   3. An idea is Laughable if you can laugh at it.
   4. An information source, like a newspaper or a weather forecast, is reliable if you can rely on it.

   Words that should exist

   1. Wrength: the degree to which something is wrong (as in "strong" and "strength")
   2. Atmospherics: a single word to replace the clunky "atmospheric science." Words like "asymptotics", "numerics", "physics", and "statistics" are already accepted, and it's time to give the atmosphere its due.
   3. Awkerly: the opposite of awkward. This is a straightforward consequence of the convention that "eastward" and "easterly" mean "towards the east" and "from the east", respectively.
   4. Utmosphere: the set of all extremes. The atmosphere, a.k.a. the sky, is "the limit" --- what a quantity can be "at most". Similarly the utmosphere is the set of all "utmost" quantities, which can only be accessed via (utmost) importance sampling. This is the topic of my research.
   5. Adverbisation of adjectives ending in "-ly" (I always carry a lily pad to jot down new examples when they occur to me):
      • Leisurelily
      • Sillily
      • Miserlily
      • Earlily: how I like to wake up in the morning
      • Weeklily: describes how most groups meet
      • Easterlily: how the wind blows when it blows from the east. Also a nice flower.
      • Elderlily: how old people behave

Common grammatical errors (in my opinion anyway)

1. "You can eat fish any number of ways" should be "You can eat fish in any of a large number of ways"
2. "Jupiter is incomparably larger than Earth"---no, you just compared them. You mean "inequitable"

Common verbal ticks

1. Airline employees: "we DO apologize AT THIS TIME"
2. Politicians: "...your tax DOLLARS..."

Over-interpretation of street names

1. Westminster (came across on a run in Providence, RI): a stack of superlatives. The most "we", the minimum value of that, the most extreme of that, and more of that than others.
2. Partridge and Bartlett (two adjacent streets in Somerville): both are in the same tree that is the vehicle of my true love's Christmas gifts.
3. Waverly (in Allston): from the waves

Pithy observations

1. Ever since humanity started using calendars, our days have been numbered.
2. Ever since humanity started building factories with smokestacks, pollution has gone through the roof.
3. The mechanical hound in Fahrenheit 451 should be called the "dogmatic."
4. Do we sneeze to expel microbes, or do the microbes make us sneeze so they can infect nearby people? If it's the latter, I wonder if humans can be considered microbes for the Earth, and space exploration is the Earth sneezing us out.
5. Bruce Springsteen songs ending in "land" tend to be masterpieces: "The Promised Land", "Jungleland", and "This Hard Land" are among my favorites.
6. The Harvard Bridge should be renamed the Shortfellow Bridge, because (1) it is nowhere near Harvard, (2) its length is measured in units of a short fellow named Smoot, and (3) it is the next bridge to the west of the Longfellow bridge. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Jokes

1. All the wheat in America is genetically identical, because it's all inbred.
2. Actors tell each other "break a leg" for good luck. Musicians say "harm a knee".
3. The Hebrews ate horseradish at the first Passover seder in order to clear out their Sinai.
4. The mathematician Charles Hermite was extraordinarily tough. He once did surgery on his own knee, earning the name "self-joint operator."
5. Definition: An algorithm is called "recursive" if it induces the user to swear repeatedly at their computer.
6. The larger the sample size, the more confidence we have in the population average. Therefore, the N's justify the means.
7. Humans took so long to find their way to North America because they had to get their Bering Strait.
8. The melting of Arctic permafrost will destabilize important structures, such as Alaskan hospitals, through a mechanism known as Barrow Clinic Instability.
9. When I finally visit the Bering Strait, Alaska native for advice on choosing a warm set of clothes. Maybe Alpaca sweater.
10. Society didn't just gradually phase out the Slow Fourier Transform; we quit cool turkey.
11. There's some fancy French cheese whose name I can't remember...
12. To study the "Snowball Earth" hypothesis, it helps to use ice-in-tropic coordinates.
13. My friend and collaborator Robert Webber tells me that Caltech is such a small community, that whenever you walk through campus you're bound to Pasadena.
14. Discrete probability distributions are much more reliable than continuous distributions. You can always count on their support
15. "Don't knock it till you try it" --burglar credo
16. A country run by deer sounds like a good idea, except I think it would lead to stagnation.
17. If you measure frequency too precisely, you find the truth hertz.
18. When a kind action is reciprocated, I am one-over.

Chiasmuses

1. Normal people say "don't re-invent the wheel." Mathematicians say "we invent the reals."
2. We should be chipper, with no chip on our shoulder.

Cool links

1. State name origins
2. Online physics textbooks
3. NATO phonetic alphabet

Illustrations

1. A summary of complex numbers

   

2. An application of complex numbers