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    A brief touch on dialect

    So I’m now reading Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes’s American English: Dialects and Variation, and I love the way they explain the details and quirks of the dialects as though the reader has never heard them. Not that that isn’t a good thing, because it’s generally known what assumptions can do to someone, but it’s highly entertaining to read: Another Southern American helping verb form which serves to convey a meaning which is not readily indicated in standard English is the word liketa, as in It was so cold out there, I liketa died. Historically, liketa comes from like to have and seems to have been equivalent in meaning to…

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    And so we begin…

    I’m not sure where I want to go with this. I want to track my workouts in a journal-like form to allow me to better track progress, problems, and conditions. I’m also not sure how regular I will be with this. The goal, of course, is to post after every workout, running or weights, to achieve the benefits of running this here blog. We’ll see. Current workout schedule: Monday thru Friday, 05:30: Run intervals for three to five miles on school track. Problems to track: splints, asthma/sinuses, upper-body posture problems. Tuesday, Friday, 17:00: Weightlifting with upper-body focus. Bench/ground base jammer, lat pulldown, shoulder press, tricep pushdown. Follow by ten minutes…

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    More about the money

    Jenny’s comment (will open in new window) got me thinking about that old issue I love to ponder: when and where and how parental limits are defined with regards to responsibility and, yes, money. First, I’m fairly certain I’m over any bitterness I felt towards my parents for their choice to drop college financing on my lap. In part, this is due to the fact that I completely understand their decision (and did even as they made it–it was not a surprise to me), and in part this is because they did, in fact, help me when I needed it during the school year. Second, I don’t think Jenny is…

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    Ain’t that some shit?

    Things are going well for me. Dr. M has slowed down my work on the organic matter project to a crawl while Jenn runs an experiment. Either that, or I am supposed to be crunching the data already, and I just don’t know it yet. That leaves me with energy to work on the TiON project (the semiconductor), which is good, since P., who is really supposed to be the principal student investigator at Rose, just started his position as a counselor at a Calculus program Rose runs, reducing his hours to maybe three hours a day. He was kind enough to leave me with a botched actinometry experiment I…

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    Absorption…

    …coefficients can be determined by multiplying the measured absorbance of your sample at each wavelength by 2.303 (which comes from a log transformation) and dividing by your pathlength, which is usually 0.0100 m (1.00 cm)… Right. Sorry. Wrong kind of absorption. So I went out for coffee and sno-cones last night with this guy, who I shall call the Cool CS Guy for a lack of imagination, and we’re talking, as most people tend to do when sitting down and drinking chai, and I had a small epiphany about myself: much of the extent of my more pleasant social interactions involve what I’m [now] terming “absorption”. When I meet people…