(Initial note: Mae has a blog. Let it be known.) So a recent dispute between C. and Mae has me thinking. (This is a good thing, although there may be some controversy.) Yes, another dangerous thought “thread” has forked off. The question: should we censor the topics of discussion to avoid possibly offending a friend who refuses to speak up on her discomfort? (And I’ll add to that that it’s even unknown whether the topic of discussion is offending the woman, or if she’s just tired of the topic being discussed. She just doesn’t speak up.) For instance: Some woman is Catholic. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that…

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…

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…

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…

…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…