Posts from — December 2010

I stumbled upon The Awful German Language by Mark Twain yesterday. If you know anything about German (I only know a bit), you’ll likely find it entertaining. I particularly liked this passage on gender:

Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print — I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

“Gretchen: Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm: She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm: It has gone to the opera.”

Also, among his suggestions to improve the language:

I would do away with those great long compounded words; or require the speaker to deliver them in sections, with intermissions for refreshments. To wholly do away with them would be best, for ideas are more easily received and digested when they come one at a time than when they come in bulk. Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than with a shovel.

Procrastinating as usual, I just finished my 2010 donations. Last year, I slacked off on this a lot, so I was determined to make up for it this year.

Here are the charities I chose, in no particular order:

• UNICEF (for Haiti)

• Multiple Sclerosis Society
• March of Dimes
• Lutheran Volunteer Corps (my brother works for them!)
• Larkin Street Services (transitional housing, medical care, job training and scholarship assistance to homeless kids in SF)
• Haitian Health Foundation
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Reporters Without Borders
• Delancey Street Foundation (“residential self-help organization for former substance abusers, ex-convicts, homeless and others who have hit bottom.”)

I’d like to find some good charities for political reforms next year, but I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for at this point.

Don’t forget to donate before the year is out!

I opted out of the the full-body scan at the airport today.

For some reason, the line I was in had the body scan, but the one next to me didn’t. I was directed toward the scanner, and at the last moment I decided to ask the TSA employee if it was too late to opt out. She informed me I could opt out, but I’d have to get the full pat-down, which I acknowledged. I don’t care too much about my privacy in this context, but these scanners strike me as the epitome of the security/industrial complex, and I figured that I would just be supporting it by going along with them. I think this strategy actually makes some sense, as when I opted out, the TSA employee asked me why I was opting out. I hadn’t really thought about it, so I just said “because I want to”. Hopefully that didn’t come off as too rude. Importantly, after hearing my answer, she wrote down some sort of note on a piece of paper and checked a box, presumably marking that another person had opted out and putting my lame reason in some category. Anyway, the pat-down was pretty invasive, but the people were very professional, so it wasn’t so bad.

The NY Times has some great visualizations of Census data. Above is the racial makeup of the area where I live. It’s segregated enough that I can tell what each of the colors represents without looking at the key, but it seems like San Francisco is more integrated than a lot of other cities I’ve seen on there.