My daughter has made a Christmas tableau; here is a detail:
When I drew the curtains this morning, I saw this:
More snow. Six inches in the night, a white Christmas. Some of us — actually, the one who is about six inches tall — went back to bed.
It certainly looks nice from the bedroom.
But I generally stay inside on Christmas Eve. We have shut the bird cage; not that he goes out much in wintertime, but we don’t want him to chew through the tree light cables. Yes, Germans, we use electric lights on our tree. Sorry about that. I’ve never understood why bare candle flames wouldn’t set the tree on fire, though. Norwegians, who all have wooden houses, are always very worried about fire.
Now it’s five o’clock on Christmas Eve and all the church bells are ringing. Merry Christmas.
A Bad Guide 
When I drew the curtains this morning, we saw a fine cock pheasant disporting himself on the snow on the back lawn. He was there yesterday too.
Merry Christmas, Crown, and to your family and beasties too.
Freezing rain here, but we will brave the roads anyhow. My poor brother will have to leave his airplane at home.
Merry Christmas, dearie & Mrs dearie.
Everyone should leave their aeroplanes at home today.
Merry Christhmas! Everything is so cute! The house and decorations, the tree and beautiful snow. I envy with all white envy ( it’s clean and nice feeling like being happy for someone as opposed to the black one).
forgot to mention sobachku! she’s cute too
One and, especially, all!
Merry Christmas to all goat-lovers around, and more of this beautiful snow.
leave their aeroplanes at home
An airplane can turn a four hour drive into a trip of less than an hour.
The study looks like it belongs in a model railroad set. Maybe Z gauge.
Merry Christmas, and thanks for sharing the photos — my Norsk half is feeling pleasantly seasonal!
No White Christmas in London, finally, what little there was of it has thawed in the last few days.
North of Watford (English joke) I understand the bookies are paying out – snow is so rare here that there is a lot of betting on it being a White Christmas in towns and cities all over the UK.
We are still playing classical Christmas music (some from St. Marks, Venice) on Boxing Day because it’s just so peaceful.
We had a lovely day, I hope everyone else did too, and have their Christmas Boxes ready for the staff today …
No White Christmas in my part of France either (I am visiting family), although there was a little snow the day before, which did not stay. Not much fun having Christmas without kids around, but that will come tomorrow. Enjoy yourselves, everybody!
We have had 13 people squeezed into my mother’s little house. Average age in the late 40s, but we all tend to revert to childhood under the circumstances so statistics are misleading.
I read recently that statistics ought to replace (the) calculus as the last thing children* learn in math at school. What do you think about that? (The) calculus has never been the slightest use despite my having endured it twice. And why is it the calculus? To me, the “the” sounds slightly pretentious, sort of like “the Baroque”.
*children like me, at any rate: ones who definitely aren’t going to become mathematicians.
Wikipedia simply calls it “calculus” without “the”. That’s how I’ve always heard it discussed. Is “the calculus” the way it translates from Norwegian ?
“The calculus” gets 1.2 million g.hits. It’s quite common, even allowing for the cases where it’s just an adjective (“The Calculus Pages”). Why isn’t (say) differential calculus or integral calculus a calculus? I’m not sure if it’s used in Norwegian. He’s an engineer, so it’s a good question for Trond. Not that they use it/them much either, as far as I know.
I asked a friend of mine who is a radio engineer (installs FM stations and so forth) about the value of calculus (about which I know nothing).
He replied:
He also said:
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts – for support rather than illumination.
Andrew Lang
“If your experiment needs statistics, then you ought to have done a better experiment.
Lord Ernest Rutherford. Also attributed to Sir Arthur Eddington.”
It can strike people as a little snooty to call the subject the calculus. But I don’t think that this name really originates in any snooty feelings. A calculus is a method of reckoning. Many methods have been called calculi. In mathematics one does actually speak of the infinitesimal calculus, the calculus of variations, the Kirby calculus, and others. The definite article does not make these phrases sound snooty to me, any more than it does the expressions “the theory of numbers” and or “the theory of sets”, which merely sound a little old-fashioned beside the alternatives “number theory” and “set theory”.
The trouble begins when people refer to the infinitesimal calculus as the calculus. It can sound snooty because it can sound as if there’s an unspoken attitude that this is the only calculus worth mentioning; but the reality is just that this calculus is mentioned more often than all the others put together and “infinitesimal” is a mouthful that people are happy to skip saying.
The other source of the impression of snootiness is that it is common nowadays to refer to this subject (the calculus, a.k.a. the infinitesimal calculus) as “calculus”. Perfectly understandable to do so , considering that the names for so many other fields and subfields of knowledge do not take the definite article: algebra, geometry, analysis, arithmetic, number theory, logic, to take a few more examples from mathematics. (Actually the “al” in “algebra” was originally a definite article!) When you’re used to hearing it called simply “calculus”, it can sound like the subject is putting on airs if it calls itself “the calculus”, but it’s really historical accident that it does so.
I wonder if “the calculus” isn’t British in the same way they say “maths” instead of “math”.
Statistics has changed a lot since the 80’s, mostly due to computers. When I first took statistics, you could do all the calculations with a regular calculator, but now computers have gotten so big and fast that it’s possible to manipulate meta data with them. So the field of statistics has changed completely and anyone who learned it back in the 80’s will have to start over. You also need some rather expensive programs like SAS or SSPS, which have some rather inscrutable software.
I wonder if “the calculus” isn’t British in the same way they say “maths” instead of “math”.
I.e., they’re both quaint?
I think that over time the “the” has been getting dropped more and more in both America and Britain. Conceivably faster in America.
As far as I know (but that’s not saying much) the Americans never said “maths” and the British are not moving toward “math”.
I now see ‘the calculus’ is merely shorthand for the infinitesimal calculus and I withdraw my accusation that it’s (possibly) slightly pretentious. I’m sure I’ve heard it just as often in the USA as in Britain, by the way.
I still don’t like “the baroque”; it’s an adjective, (the baroque what?).
The baroque style? The baroque movement?
It’s true that they don’t (often) say “the classical”, or “the romantic” or “the neoclassical”. They do say “The High Romantic”, though, don’t they?
You are far from being the first to take umbrage at that “the”. A former Ph. D. student of mine used to complain about it to me, I remember*. But he was from Bosnia; maybe the opinions of people from Slav(on)ic-speaking lands about definite articles should be taken with a grain of salt.
*The context was not actually the infinitesimal calculus but its homotopy-theoretic analogue the “functor calculus” or “calculus of functors”.
I can’t imagine anything more exasperating for a native-speaker of a Slavonic language. Well, perhaps I can, but I won’t. And for the rest of us all of a sudden “functor calculus” is the calculus. By “us”, of course, I don’t mean me, unfortunately.
By “us”, of course, I don’t mean me,
For I am I and we are we.
But Rastas gladly simplify,
And each and all are “I and I.”
No, the Bosnian was objecting to “the calculus of _____” as a pretentious-sounding alternative to “calculus of _____”. Nobody would ever omit the “_____” unless it was “infinitesimal” (or “differential” or “integral”).
Sorry, lack of parallelism there. Let’s say he was objecting to “the _____ calculus” as a pretentious-sounding alternative to “ _____calculus”.
Or alternatively let’s say “Nobody would ever omit the ‘_____’ unless it was ‘infinitesimals’.”
On the actual serious question of whether this is the right thing to be teaching in school, maybe I will pull some thoughts together and post at my own blog one of these days.
Ø: Nobody would ever omit the ‘_____’ unless it was ‘infinitesimals’.
Only someone called Empty could write that.
maybe I will pull some thoughts together and post.
Please do. My thought was that calculus (the infinitesimal variety) is historically significant, coming from Archimedes, Newton & Leibnitz (and analytical geometry having been invented by Descartes) so it’s nice for people to have some idea of what it’s about. On the other hand, statistics figures in our day-to-day lives, and perhaps if we understood something about the subject and how the numbers were obtained we could more often judge its utility.
I think Hat’s poem must be original. It doesn’t google anywhere. Not sure about the rasta part though.
Statistics is very useful for calculating the odds of anything, like winning the lottery. Since the politicians here seem very enamored of the revenue received from the lottery and casinos, not taking into effect the social costs, of course, especially in the most economically desperate areas where they spend the most money on gambling, I doubt very much it will ever be taught to schoolchildren. Without their search for “lucky numbers” what would they have to look forward to in life?
I and I. Language undoubtedly wrote it, and if I were even slightly better educated I would be able to identify the metre.
I would call it iambic tetrameter. Google means never having to remember anything.
http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/xmeter.html
I think Hat’s poem must be original.
It would be quite a coincidence if there were a preexisting poem that just happened to use AJP’s exact phrase, don’t you think?
I and I.
Mon, why you link to dat Babylonian Dylan person? Rastafarian vocabulary:
Thanks for the Rastafarian vocabulary link, Language. Sorry for mentioning Blob.
It would be quite a coincidence if there were a preexisting poem that just happened to use AJP’s exact phrase, don’t you think?
No, I don’t. AJP drops a lot of oblique references into his comments. Compare with Kipling: “All good people agree, And all good people say, All nice people, like Us, are We And every one else is They.” And why the sarcasm?
Bow humbly to the assembled adoring throngs and admit authorship.
What’s wrong with Bob Dylan? I thought he was a minor deity, right below Leonard Cohen.
I love Bob Dylan myself, but my wife can’t stand him.
I love Bob Dylan too. My wife thinks he’s god.
I love Bob Dylan, both neither of my children has much tolerance for his voice.
I felt much better about his voice after I realised he was doing it on purpose. I could imagine someone taking the opposite point of view about that, though.
By the way Nij, I enjoyed your Lhat youtube link to that unreleased song performed by Leonard Cohen.
I agree with Hat’s wife, can’t stand Bob Dylan’s singing. I once bought a Lotte Lenya record in Cologne and when I got it home, it turned out the sleeve contained Bob Dylan. I was sure they’d done it on purpose to annoy me.
Well, I think it was worth it, because it’s a damn good story.
Language: I and I
I guess you saw this at Poemas del rio Wang:
Растаманские народные сказки
No, I missed that — thanks!