What I Learned Today

I recently finished reading Perdido Street Station, a book by China Miéville. I struggled with whether to categorize it as sci-fi or fantasy or what, then came across Miéville’s own description, which is just right: “a secondary world fantasy with Victorian era technology.” (“Secondary world” here is intended in Tolkien’s sense of the phrase, I imagine.) The story itself is colorful, vivid, wildly creative, grungy, and fueled by crisis — a lot like the world it portrays. And one of its primary defining characteristics is its use of vocabulary.

Some of the unusual words that appear in this book are made up ones, set as it is in an alternate reality with different species (and physics). But some of them are genuine English words, just not ones I’d encountered or become familiar with. What a delight to be educated and entertained at the same time! Here is my list of new words, thanks to Miéville:

autopoiesis: self-creation

autotelic: an activity or work containing its own purpose (“autotelic processing”)

bathos (not pathos) and bathetic (not pathetic): unintentional anticlimax

bitumen: sticky, black, highly viscous liquid (“bitumened terrace”)

caliginous: misty, dim, obscure, dark (“caliginous halo”)

deracinated: torn up by the roots (“deracinated outsider”)

desquamating: coming off in scales or flakes

eidolon: idealized person or thing

femtoscopic: coinage to indicate even tinier than microscopic

kukris: curved knife that broadens towards its point (“organic kukris”)

oneiric: relating to dreams

phlogistic: inflammatory

pugnacious: eager or quick to argue or fight (“faltering, pugnacious steps”)

pyrotic: caustic (“pyrotic gas”)

quintumvirate: council of five

ratiocination: the process of logical reasoning

scintillas: tiny trace or spark (“scintillas of glass”)

secateurs: one-handed pruning clippers

shambolic: in a shambles (“shambolic housing”)

stele: stone or wooden slab erected for funerals or commemorative purposes

thermotaxic: related to internal temperature regulation (for animals)

viscid: glutinous, sticky (“viscid scum”)

These two I could not find definitions for; possibly made up? Any tips?

hieronomer (“dervishes and hieronomers”)

karcist

The novel itself is full of food for thought, and also fodder for your vocabulary. Enjoy!

Today featured another fun, adrenaline-pumping time at the Bay Shore Church in Long Beach, during which ~35 contestants gathered to try to spell each other into oblivion. The National Adult Spelling Bee awards $500 to the winner and $500 to the charity of their choice. This time I was joined by friends Evan and Sam, which made it even more enjoyable!

Last time I made it to round 18 before failing to spell “latkes”. This year I managed to spell the following correctly:

• dynamic
• demographic
• hypothesis
• disaffiliate
• discomfit
• flaccid
• myrmidon
• zydeco
• jejune
• nudnik
• abscissa

At that point, we were down to four spellers left. I misspelled “vizsla” (?!), but the three others remaining also failed to spell their words correctly, so we all survived to the next round. I then promptly misspelled “boustrophedon” (as “boustrephedon”) and the woman after me misspelled “oriflamme” (argh, I knew that one! :) ), so we tied for third place. (Boustrophedon describes a piece that is written right-to-left and left-to-right in alternating lines. Vizsla is some kind of dog breed. Aie!) The two remaining spellers duked it out for a few more rounds until Janice Davis (a returning 2008 champ) won over Nicholas Kuefler (an amazing speller from Georgia). The words by that point were bordering on ludicrous; the organizers were having trouble just pronouncing them. Good job, Janice and Nicholas!

Once again I must comment on the luck factor involved in single-elimination spelling bees. Here are some words, assigned to other spellers, that I would have misspelled if they’d been given to me:

• emolument: a salary, fee, or profit from employment
• pullulate: to breed or spread so as to become very common
• vinaceous: of the color of red wine
• jodhpurs: trousers for horseback riding
• neoteny: the retention of juvenile features in the adult animal
• chiliast: same as “millenarian” (a Christian belief)
• ecesis: the successful establishment of a plant or animal species in a habitat
• clerihew: a short comic or nonsensical verse, typically in two rhyming couplets with lines of unequal length and referring to a famous person
• monadnock: an isolated hill or ridge

How would you do? I know many people reading this are excellent spellers!

So many words to learn. Such a fun event! I’m glad I got a chance to participate again.

Have you ever wondered what a diopter is? After my most recent trip to the optometrist, I decided to find out what an eyeglass prescription means.

Wikipedia, as usual, is a great place to start. At a high level, the “spherical” correction number indicates how much isotropic correction is needed — magnification that applies equally in all directions. The “cylindrical” correction applies to astigmatisms, which require magnification preferentially in one direction to fine-tune the spherical correction. “Axis” specifies the orientation of that cylindrical correction.

The units in which the spherical and cylindrical corrections are specified are called diopters. A diopter has a physical meaning; it is the reciprocal of the focal length in meters. So a spherical correction of -0.50 corresponds to a lens with a focal length of 2 m.

I collected my prescriptions since 1998, when I first got glasses. Now I can track my visual degradation graphically (except for an elusive 2006 prescription, which I cannot find — argh!):

Apparently my distance vision isn’t terrible (something like 20/50), but my astigmatism is what causes me blurring trouble, and it keeps getting worse. Next up: a regression analysis in which I forecast the date on which I’ll be legally blind!

Wikipedia also includes an interesting discussion of presbyopia, the gradual decline in ocular lens flexibility. This is what permits your eye to focus over a wide range of distances. Children generally can accommodate a range of more than 10 diopters, while those older than 50 can only accommodate 2. Check out this plot:

Wikipedia claims that kids can focus on something only 10 cm (~4 inches) from their eyes. Can you? Try it! (I can’t, darn!) This calculator purports to determine how much reading-glass (near-vision) correction you would need, as a function of your age; unfortunately, it only works if you’re at least 37.

As an interesting etymological note, the root “presby-” in presbyopia means “old” or “elder” (i.e., presbyopia = elder-eye), and is the same root in “priest” (“presbyter”) and “presbyterian.”

Make: Electronics by Charles Platt is one of my current favorite books. I’m working my way through it, experiment by experiment, and learning tons about circuits, components, soldering, schematics, and more along the way. Recently I was working with switches and relays and learned an interesting bit of etymology.

Switches permit the controlled connection, or disconnection, of a circuit. We’re all familiar with light switches, doorbells, computer on/off switches, etc. Less familiar (now) is the telephone switchboard, for which an operator had to be able to selectively connect together pairs of the thousands of possibilities, as quickly as possible.

Charles E. Scribner, a man of great ingenuity, developed the “jack-knife switch” to make fast switching possible. This was a plug with a jackknife-like handle (hence the name) that could be inserted into a socket to activate the switch. Two such plugs at either ends of a cord allowed the connection of any two sockets, yielding an active telephone connection.

Although switchboards are no longer used today, the same jack-knife switch design was used to design audio connectors — which is why we refer to those plugs as “jacks”, even though no knife handle remains. I had never thought to wonder why they were called that!

“Supercilious” is probably a word you’ve heard (meaning “showing haughty disdain”), but do you know its origin? I didn’t until now! It comes from “super” (above) and “cilium” (eyelid), which together become “eyebrow”, and refers to the act of arching an eyebrow in disdain. Coined in the 1520s, I infer that the habit of using the eyebrow in this way must go way, way back. Today in the 2010s, we instead could use an emoticon that can express the same feeling in eyebrow-less email and other online communications. Any suggestions?