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| date | 2001-03-13:10:50 |
| SelfConciousness |
I've had a lot of fun with various "personality evaluation" software available on the 'Net. Judging by the results, I'm an artistically inclined, intelligent, intellectual gay woman.  Given that part of the rating for the above is "Your clothes are so perfect they sometimes look fake", I think I'm pretty safe in taking the rest with a grain of salt. According to The Spark's Gender Test I'm a woman, but reports from others around the Web suggest that their claim for 100% accuracy is correct only when rating young American rednecks. The prevalence of "Who Am I?" type quizzes and the success of nonsense like the Myers-Briggs scale and enneagrams--to say nothing of Philotypes(TM)--is something that needs explaining, and I have an explanation to offer. You are what you do. And most people don't do very much. Therefore, they need some other form of feedback to tell them what kind of person they are. Any kind will do, because in the absence of action it's impossible to know the answer anyway. So most people are happy when Myers-Briggs tells them they are, for example, a "Field Marshal" (what I got, strangely) even though they've never organized so much as a picnic successfully. It lets them say, "This is the kind of person I am" without actually putting it to the test. |
| Software |
There's a cartoon showing a couple of scientists standing before a whiteboard covered with a hugely complex mathematical expression followed by an "=" sign and a blank space. One scientist is saying to the other, "I hate this part." At a certain point, all research reaches that stage, and the stuff I'm doing at the moment has. It always feels like a leap in the dark, and you never know if you're going to land on the rocks, or be caught by an updraft. It's a very lonely place. |
| Creatures | Two big red tailed hawks were circling over the field when we took the dogs out to play on the weekend. They swirled around each other, riding the currents of air, to all appearances not moving so much as a feather. I wish I could fly like that. |
| Anomalies |
It's now pretty much accepted that there were Viking colonies in North America around 1000 A.D. But it wasn't always so. When I was growing up this idea had pretty much the same status as sitings of Bigfoot and UFOs--a quaint folk-belief, not absolutely impossible, but not something that anyone respectable would admit to believing. Columbus was the first European to set foot on the Americas (even if he never actually did get to the mainland), period. Suggestions that other Europeans got there first, be they Vikings or Portuguese cod-fishers, were on the ragged edge of the lunatic fringe. Which brings us to two anomalies. The first is that the term used for "cod" by natives living in Newfoundland was apparently very close to the Portuguese word for cod, as reported by the "first" European explorers along that way. This suggests that the cod fishery on the Grand Banks predated Columbus' "discovery" by quite a long time--long enough to have introduced a new word into the local language. The other anomaly is more interesting, and one that I've heard about only anecdotally, in a first-year geology class twenty years ago. The class included a lecture on radio-carbon dating, and the prof mentioned in passing that you sometimes got funny results. For instance, there was a horse excavated from a quarry just north of here, and radiocarbon dating put it's date of death around 1000 years ago. The only problem is, there weren't any horses in North America 1000 years ago. The researcher who did the dating was apparently convinced that it was a Viking horse, but everyone new that only kooks believed that the Vikings were in North America at that time. Now, we know differently. The result is apparently mentioned in a footnote in a book on radiocarbon dating, but is otherwise unpublished. It would be interesting to track down the site and see if any other artifacts are around--it's quite possible that there was at least one Viking expedition into the interior of North America, along the Saint Lawrence, before the climate cooled off again and wiped the colonies out. |