A Myriad Myriad of Myriads

The term 'myriad' can be used a noun or an adjective. For example, here it is as an adjective: A dark clear sky, with its myriad stars, invariably fills me with awe. And here it is as a noun (a plural noun, no less!): A dark clear sky, with its myriads of stars, invariably fills me with awe.

A funny thing about this term is that when I first encountered it (eons ago) my instinct was to think of it as a noun. In the book I was reading (the title of which is lost to me) it was used as an adjective and it sounded dead wrong. To my ear it was a word that sounded like it had to be something. A myriad. The myriad. Myriads and myriads of something. I looked it up and to my surprise found that it was being used correctly as an adjective. In fact, my impression was that the entry noted that using 'myriad' as a noun was incorrect (or at least frowned upon).

The difference between how my ear wanted to perceive the word, and the preferred usage prescribed by the dictionary created such a weird dissonance that I actively forced myself to use 'myriad' as an adjective as much as possible. In my thinking mostly, because at whatever young age I was at the time, regularly using a word like 'myriad' in speech would probably not have been a sociably adept move.

In any case, I learned to prefer and use the adjective form of the word. Seeing it used as a noun grates on me even though there is no reason to avoid it. In fact, its use as a noun is evidently older than its use as an adjective. Garner states that "myriad is more concise as an adjective," but confirms that the noun has "been with us more than 200 years longer than the adjective, and the choice is a question of style, not correctness." (Garner, GMAU 3d, p553)

Both of the example sentences in the first paragraph are correct, but I prefer the first.

All My Circuits Are Functioning Perfectly

Watson kicked some serious carbon-based brain on Jeopardy.

The three shows that aired were interesting, outlining the background of the IBM project and detailing some of the challenges the engineers faced as they fine tuned the system to compete at a championship level - Watson's AI against Jeopardy's two most successful champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. I also watched the Nova episode which covered the development of Watson in much greater depth.

The most daunting challenge for the computer scientists and engineers who designed Watson was dealing with the not-so-straightforward stuff that comes up on Jeopardy: puns, double meanings, jokes, homonyms, and Jeopardy's always enjoyable "before and after" questions (extremely terrible example: Pays your dinner bill while organizing your contacts. What is a Credit card file, Alex?). In other words, how do you design a computer that can parse language and tease out nuances?

While watching the games, I felt that Watson had an advantage. There were lots of fact-based trivia questions that required little of the sophisticated language parsing skills that the Watson team worked so hard to develop. Answering these questions with the massive databases that Watson had at its disposal seemed trivial. I assume that the categories and questions were selected randomly, but it would have been more interesting if there were trickier questions. Additionally, and maybe more importantly, Watson seemed to be able to buzz in faster than the other contestants. Consistently, and to the chagrin of Jennings and Rutter.

In general, I think it would have been more fun (and maybe a fairer fight) if Watson was forced to wrestle with more of those tricky language questions, but I came away very impressed. I'm not in the camp of "oh shit, next stop, Skynet!!" I think this is more along the lines of Star Trek TNG's Majel Barrett-voiced ship's computer - a system that can assist humans with sorting intelligently through massive amounts of potentially relevant data in order to answer a question, learn something new, etc.

The thing that really struck me, however, was not the idea of a new, hyper-intelligent computer, but rather was the human ingenuity that went into designing and refining this system. The Nova episode manages to give the viewer a peek into the process, and it's both amazing and inspiring.

Painted Brick

If you work in a paint store, as I did many many moons ago, you are very often called upon to mix custom paint colors. Part of this process is computerized, and part of it requires patience, skill, and a keen eye. Tints are added to bases, shaken up in a machine, and the resulting color is tested for accuracy by applying a coat of paint to a pre-primed glass slide. A heat gun is used to dry the paint quickly - paint dries to a noticeably different shade than it is when wet. We would use a brick to support the glass slides under the heat gun. During down time (never buffoonery(inside joke)), we would sometimes paint the brick. Near the end of my tenure at this job, I painted the silly scene you see above on the brick. I decided to keep the brick to remember my time at the paint store. I snagged a replacement brick from a construction site down the road. Got yelled at by a burly construction worker and everything.

Inspired by my good friend Dave's photo Brickman, which, as it turns out, is of the very brick that I snagged from that construction site so long ago.

The Sports Team From My Area Makes Me Very Cranky

Yet another Patriots playoff meltdown leaves me pondering the idea of fandom once again. After spending the entire game yelling impotently at the TV, the rational part of my brain that usually runs things in my head resumed command and I was immediately struck by how insanely stupid it all is. It's just a game. It's a game played by grown men who make millions of dollars to do so. I have absolutely nothing riding on whether the team I'm rooting for wins. I have absolutely no control or say over the outcome. The only connection to me at all is that it happens to be the team from the area where I spent the majority of my formative years.

The Onion, naturally, has covered this - and quite a while ago.

It is time step back again and focus on what I can control, sports wise. I'm looking ahead to the 2011 racing season. The first 5K on my calendar is March 26. I'll not quite yet be looking to beat my personal record - not that early in the season anyway - but hopefully I'll be close. What's more, there will be no hype (and no trash talking). It's just me trying to run a good race.

Fort Point - Winter

Quotidia 25

This is the view south from the office building I work in. I went crazy with post processing as you can see, among other things giving it a miniaturized look using a tilt-shift effect.

I've been lax with cross posting these and will try to rectify that. All the quotidia photos can be seen on my flickr page, if you are interested in such things.

How Music Works

How Music Works - LibraryThing Book Review

How Music Works is a fantastic introductory book for the musically interested but otherwise musically uneducated reader. John Powell writes in a breezy conversational style, never talking down to his reader. He discusses the very basics of acoustics, melody, harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation. I think he does a marvelous job tying everything up into a complete package that an interested lay reader should appreciate. As a trained musician, I found myself wanting more from the book, but I cannot fault it for that. Music - and more specifically music theory and acoustics - can seem an arcane field to those who are interested but have had no training. I will certainly recommend this book to people I know who tell me that they'll never be able to understand music. How Music Works should be able to set the initiated reader on to the path of learning, well, how music works.

Standardized Torture

Gah - I hate standardized tests! I am, as mentioned previously, furiously studying for the GRE. The big day is this coming Monday - at 8:30 in the morning. Am I ready? Not as ready as I'd like to be. In my practice tests I have done consistently well on the verbal section, but my performance on the quantitative section has been a little spotty. Much of the math has come back, but not all of it. I could stand to take a full blown review course, but alas, there isn't time. I am hoping that on test day I can kill on the verbal section to bring the combined score up to a decent, if not respectable, number. In the end, I'll just need to try to avoid conflating my GRE score with my worth as a human being.

Update 1/3/2011: It is done. I did better than I expected - respectably even. Now it's time for a celebratory libation! Hooray!

In with the New

Out with the Old

Quotidia 12

Shadow Aspect

Quotidia 11, my weaknesses are showing...