tidbits.Qrystal.name

I took a moment to research a little deeper into my discomfort about today being “celebrated” because it can be written in such a way that the digits are in numerical order: 12:34:56 on 7/8/09. What bothered me about it is that the date notation just feels so awkward, because it is not in increasing or decreasing order.

I prefer to write 2009-07-08 for today, myself. But why is that? Someone suggested it might be a Canadian thing, but I was under the impression that the difference between the Canadian and American ways was that one was month-day-year and one was day-month-year, neither preferring to put the year first, and the only way for me to free myself of the mess was to find a different way altogether. A more logical way… or we could even say, CHRONOlogical. And alphabetical too.

It seems I wasn’t alone in this. I discovered a page today that outlines a lot of fascinating information about International standard date and time notation. It also said the quote above, which made me giggle out loud — a sure sign that I had to share it!

Anyways… will you join me in celebrating on ‘09-08-07 at 06:05:04 and 321 milliseconds? (I’ll try to dream of pi.)

— Some #funwithgrammar from a guide to hackers’ writing style, which describes how some quirks are for the sake of humour but others are for the sake of clarity.

Here, we are exploring an aspect of writing style that is entirely about clarity: should quotation marks include punctuation, or should the punctuation be left outside? Their argument is that a “literal string” is the entirety of what is quoted, and should not include the end-of-sentence (or end-of-clause) punctuation unless the quote actually includes such punctuation. I agree with this, but the population as a whole seems to be divided on what to believe.

Wikipedia’s style guide agrees with me, at least, and even calls it “logical quotation” style. This style is also sometimes attributed to the British, although apparently some British publications use the so-called American style, placing periods and commas inside the quotation marks even when they don’t logically belong there. (I may be biased, but as soon as logic is evident, I can’t help but support it.)

Today, the logical quotation style was used today on twitter by Brent Spiner, sparking controversy among his followers. When he retweeted the fact that someone “corrected” him, he got even more corrections flooding in. (I tried to be one of them, but I was too slow.)

The argument discussion inspired me to look up more info on this dilemma. The Wikipedia page on Quotation Marks provided me with a surprising revelation: the less intuitive way of punctuating around quotation marks was actually reasonable once, back when typesetters used the end-quotation mark to protect the much smaller comma and period characters. (This was back when typesetting involved actually setting physical character pieces into place in the printing press.)

Now, of course, there is no need to do this, but doing so is still considered “correct” because it has become ingrained in various style guides, whose sole purpose is to encourage consistency and clarity in writing. However, if the other way is more clear (more “logical”, if you will), and there is no longer a need to protect the cute-wittle-periods-and-commas, why should anyone continue doing it?

Some people claim that the comma or period placement is purely a matter of style. This does seem to be the case, but I still hold to my opinion that the logical way makes more sense (hence calling it “logical”). (Also note that in the previous sentence, I kept the period outside of the parentheses as well; I believe that this is also logical, and yet it is not logical to do so in this current sentence.) I guess some people simply have their style too ingrained to change to something that is arguably more logical (especially to those of us arguing in favour of this style point — see here for a full-fledged argument showing both sides).

Wikipedia also mentions that scientific and technical publications (even in the U.S., contrary to most American grammar style guides) preferentially place punctuation outside the quotes, unless it was part of the quote itself. Is this enough to convince anyone that this style is more logical? What about the fact that many other languages* use the more logical style, and it is only English (or even its bastard son, “American English”) that has the controversy? (* - I don’t actually know this fact for sure, but it has been used in other arguments.)

There are indications that the internet is leaning towards demanding that the logical way is the better way, but this will take time, especially since the typesetters’ (aka “American”) style seems to be so ingrained in so many people.

As one person astutely pointed out,

The only real rule of grammar is “be consistent”.

Amen. And thank you for using the logical style in expressing this.

— A quote from Catherine Cantieri’s ebook entitled, “How to Harness a Hobgoblin: The #1 Strategy to Unleash Your Creative Productivity” available at http://www.get-sorted.net.

I like this quote, because it rings so true for me. I do keep looking at my thesis in peripheral vision instead of facing it head-on, and it does keep looking humongous except when I’m actually tackling it directly.

If I can keep this quote in mind, maybe I’ll lose some of the intimidation I feel regarding working on my Uber-Big-Super-Duper-Massively-Scary-Thesis, and instead just get the frackin’ thing done!

— From the Twitter Blog: “We Learned A Lot”.

Every complaint I had was appended by an exception: if there are going to be more per-user settings in the future, everything’s going to be okay.

I’m glad to know everything’s going to be okay! Crisis averted!

Also, some discussion of scalability at ReadWriteWeb very quickly convinced me that this would be a very real issue. If it helps twitter run better, that’s a great reason to crop it away! Consider me converted.

AND!!! I had already suggested to the nice folks at twitter that it would be great to have an option to set a short text note with each of our followees, so we can remember why we are following them. I got a personal-sounding thank you, saying it sounded like a great idea, so maybe this will be coming soon too! And if there is more flexibility in per-user settings, maybe that’s when GROUPS will come into play! Or maybe that will be the Pro version! (…*gulp!*…)

So says Dr Peter Hayes, a senior lecturer in politics (yes, politics), as quoted in an article at Science Centric entitled “Has Einstein failed physics?”

I am getting really sick and tired of people trying to bring down Einstein. First it was SCIAM with their cover article, “Was Einstein Wrong?” when in fact the article was showing that Einstein’s doubts about quantum mechanics may actually be right. The original title of the article was just “A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity”, but some editor thought it would be cool to make it seem like Einstein was wrong. Einstein knew quantum mechanics was inconsistent with relativity, which is why he was so adamant that quantum theory was incomplete!

This time, I’m borderline furious that some supposedly “science-centric” website is even POSTING something by someone studying POLITICS and claiming that the theory of relativity is just a mere ideology. Relativity has been verified by experiments, including the aspect of time dilation, which is the mechanism behind the so-called Clock Paradox mentioned in the quote above.

But let me quote how the “science-centric” article describes this Clock Paradox:

“…if one clock travels in a spaceship, while the other stays on earth, when the clock in the spaceship returns it will show that less time has elapsed than the clock on earth. This prediction violates Einstein’s own ‘principle of relativity,’ which states that if you are on the spaceship it should be the clock back on earth that slows down. This is a criticism that science has never been able to satisfactorily resolve.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit! And I don’t swear often, only when the situation demands it. This situation demanded that I swear thrice! Grrr!

What actually happens in this so-called Clock Paradox is that the spaceship has to decelerate and accelerate in order to make the return trip. This breaks the symmetry between the two frames of reference. If this symmetry-breaking didn’t happen, say the spaceship was just zooming past Earth and there was some way to compare clock rates, both parties would see that the other’s clock is slow. Thus, in frames with very high relative velocities, there is a disagreement in clock rates, and that’s it! However, if one frame decelerates to meet the speed of the other, relativity can predict exactly what the resulting difference in time duration will be. This is not only “satisfactorily resolved” in science, it’s completely consistent, at least until you try and analyze it without enough background in the subject!

This is just more proof that I need to get out there and fight for true science to be known, instead of this ideology bullshit…

— Caroline Thompson

In working on my thesis, I realized I wanted to be sure that my mathematical model was modelling reality, and so I sought experiments that clearly showed what seemed to be generally assumed: that quantum entanglement is preserved when the individual parts are measured.

Not only have I not found such experiments (yet?) but I’ve found studies that show that nonlocality and entanglement may be the result of misleading interpretations of ignored loopholes! I know I have to be careful of what I read on the internet, but this Caroline Thompson seems to have such well-thought-out observations, I really want to investigate her work more thoroughly.

Or maybe I just need to finish my mathematical model of something that may or may not be a true depiction of any aspect of reality after all. On the other hand, maybe my work will bring out some geometrical interpretation that will result in something so clearly testable, it will undeniably prove or disprove what Caroline dedicated her life to revealing.