Category Archives: Random Blatherationings

Regarding nothing at all other than my brain is mush, I’ve spent the last few days wrestling with a couple of reasonably large data sets (42K+ records and 46K+ records) and trying to winnow out a much smaller subset of data that’s not explicitly encoded.

In other words, I’m looking for needles in haystacks and trying to be clever.

It’s not rocket science, but it does require some care of you’ll go straight off into the Twilight Zone and have to go back a couple of steps to recover. Sort this, search for that, pull these records, but don’t do it in the wrong order!

My group did this during my MBA about 15 years ago. (It’s astonishing to me that it’s been that long, truly, but yep, double checked, I graduated in 2007.) We had to do an analysis on a data set of our choosing and we chose one from one of my classmates’ companies that was monstrous! I’m not sure we got results on a third of the things we were supposed to be looking for, but we did show what wasn’t there for a bunch of things and got great grades for displaying awesome audacity in even trying.

This project isn’t anything like that big, or audacious, but it is making my eyes and brain bubble and bug out. However, tonight I’ve got some fantastic Jean Michel Jarre on the headphones, so that helps a lot. It also helps that the Angels sort of suck really bad this year, so I don’t feel bad about not watching them.

How was your Monday?

If you think there should be rules you obviously are new here, but if you have to have them so you’ll know when I’ve broken them, they’re here,

Tonight’s three random seed words are “incertitude”, “scrupulosity”, and “ayegreen.”

ONE: Incertitude is defined as, “Uncertainty, doubtfulness, doubt.” Can I use it in a sentence? “I was full of fluid so the doctor was forced to make an incision and incertitude to drain it.” (That would be wrong, wrong, oh so very wrong.)

Looking for something on Google using “incertitude,” I find the first page of hits are just dictionaries to define it, or give synonyms, or antonyms. (Surprisingly, no homonyms, even from Gray’s Anatomy, despite my previous use of the term.) (Wait, you thought that it was just a TV show? That’s “Grey”, not “Gray.” How could you confuse them?) But then I find page after page of entries in French.

Like this one, which apparently is talking about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Having studied physics, I know about this one. Quantum mechanics, very weird stuff. The tl;dr version here is that in the quantum world, very freakin’ tiny, you can know either where a particle is or how fast it’s going, but never both. In addition, the more precisely you measure one value, the more uncertain the other becomes.

That’s all you need to know to get this joke. “A policeman pulls over a quantum physicist and says, ‘Sir, you were doing 100 miles an hour back there.’ The physicist says, ‘Great, now I’m lost!'”)

TWO: Scrupulosity is defined as, “The quality or state of being scrupulous; respecting decisions or actions; caution or tenderness from the fear of doing wrong or offending; nice; regard to exactness and propriety precision.”

Is anyone ever referred to as “scrupulous” any more? My gut feeling is that it’s far, far more rare than its opposite, “unscrupulous.” Now there, there you your choice of people to label.

Politicians, first and foremost. Reading the political news is even worse than “reading the comments,” and just about as likely to raise your blood pressure or hone your cynicism to a fine point.

The stereotypical lawyer, sales person, or business owner, although I believe that’s probably not true nearly as often as we imagine it to be. It’s just that getting screwed by some business person or lawyer tends to stick in your memory far longer than getting treated well.

Too often, unfortunately, religious and social leaders. Maybe we put them up on a pedestal and expect them to be better than normal or to lead by example, but if you’re going to make your paycheck that way, it comes with the job. If you think being a priest is only a fast way to be alone with pre-teen altar boys or having your own congregation is the ticket to having a free Gulfstream jet (you know who I’m talking about), then maybe you’re seriously lacking in scrupulosity.

THREE: Ayegreen is defined as, “The houseleek Sempervivum tectorum.” Thank god for Google – I never would have guessed that it’s an odd little plant that’s a cross between an evergreen and a succulent, and apparently edible. They’re commonly known as “hens and chicks”?

The pictures make them look like something I’ve seen around, usually in some sort of decorative, desert-like, low maintenance, low water display, or in a rock garden. Rock gardens and “drought-friendly yards” are becoming a big thing around here as we head into the fourth year of the worst drought in recorded history for California. We haven’t had our sprinklers on for almost a year, and our yard looks like it.

They’re apparently native to the mountains of southern Europe The USDA map shows that they’ve been introduced in North America in spots along the East Coast, up into eastern Canada, and into Utah. (What the hell is up with Utah?) I suspect the USDA is only keeping track of where they can be found growing out by the roads or in the woods on their own, not where they’ve shown up in decorative planters at Home Depot. That might be all fifty states.

And do we really want to be “drought-friendly”? Not that I’m nearly as obsessed about a “putting green lawn” as most of our neighbors, but I’m more of a “suffering through as best I can” sort of person instead of a “friendly” person when it comes to droughts. It’s not like I’m going to invite the drought over for a BBQ or to watch the ballgame and have a beer.

Plus, I don’t much like beer.

Another game we haven’t played since October. What happened? Oh, yeah, NaNoWriMo, then other writing and the holidays, and now all of that plus my volunteer work with the CAF.

What kind of writing do we get tonight? Gold? Silver? Bronze? Aluminium foil? (Extra karma points if you pronouned that “Al-You-MIN-ee-um” instead of “a-LOOM-in-um”) (If you think there should be rules, they’re here, but the first rule of Random Blatherationings is that there are no rules in Random Blatherationings.) In the spirit of those cold international snow and ice games going on along the Black Sea coast, tonight’s three random seed words are “polynia”, “iconodule”, and “sentine.” (The fact the three words have nothing to do with those snow and ice games is wonderful. And, yes, I am listening to the “Saturday Night Safety Dance” again tonight as I write. Tasty!)

Polynia: When I first saw this word defined as “the open sea supposed to surround the north pole”, my immediate assumption was that it must be something like an 18th Century word, from a time when the planet hadn’t been mapped to within an inch of its life and the explorers of the age thought that there might be a huge sea up north, instead of unending ice. The Northwest Passage and all of that.

You know what they say about “assumptions.”

On further review, it seems that it’s a Russian word that has been “borrowed” by English and it has nothing to do with the north pole in particular. So, the first definition was only partially correct and was entirely misleading. Kids, this is why you check more than one source, especially on the internet!

Polynia (or “polynya” in American English) are large patches of open sea surrounded by sea ice. They can occur either in the Arctic Ocean or off the coast of Antarctica. They can be caused by localized thermal upwellings, where warmer water rises and keeps the surface from cooling enough to ice over, or by katabatic winds or currents that sweep ocean ice away from the coast, leaving an open area between ice masses swept away in successive years.

Of course, two hundred years from now this could be a totally archaic term, along with “sea ice.” As much as that will suck for our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren, it will suck a lot more for the polar bear, walrus, and penguin species that will be extinct in the wild.

Iconodule: The dictionary says, “one who serves images opposed to an iconoclast,” which would have been massively confusing even if my brain weren’t half fried. I’ve got a vague idea what an iconoclast is, but does “serves” in this definition equate to “worships” or “delivers?” Time to dig further.

Wikipedia is of limited help at first, defining “iconodule” as “someone who espouses ‘icondulism’.” Really useful, that. Does it logically follow then that a “digwopadoodle” is “someone who espouses ‘digwopadoodlism’?” Asking for a friend…

They then point out that I really didn’t understand what an “iconoclast” is. There was a religious war in the 8th Century over whether or not you should have pictures in churches? And I thought that WE argued over stupid shit! Anyway, it seems that an “icondule” was someone who wanted pictures in churches, while an “iconoclast” was someone who wanted pictures forbidden from churches.

You would think with planet-wide starvation, poverty, and an average lifespan that didn’t reach puberty they could find more worthwhile ways to spend their copious free time — but I guess you would be wrong!

It also occurred to me that if a philosophical division of such import were to break out today, the guys in favor of the paintings would be “iconodudes.” At least in Southern California.

Sentine: Finally, a definition that I can understand! “A place for dregs and dirt in a sink or sewer.” Isn’t that what we lay folk refer to as a “trap,” that U-shaped pipe under the sink?

Not quite. Further research (again!) shows that it’s an obscure and outdated term for “a sink, a sewer, a bilge hold, or a place for dregs.” We should have a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to be used to send some punctuation to whoever is writing definitions for that first website.

My last semi-lucid thought for the night is that Sentine would be the perfect name to use in some sort of spoof or comic version of “Les Miserables.” Sentine could be the Parisian whore with the heart of gold, born with a silver spoon in her mouth but forced into a life of sin and squalor by some evil archbishop or cardinal who was actually her real father. If you’re doing the Disney version, Dregs and Bilge would be the friendly animated cat and parrot who help her expose the scoundrel and win the true love of the prince. If you’re doing the Matt Groening version of the Disney version, immediately after the wedding, the peasants will rise up and behead them both.

I either need sleep, food, or both. For some reason I’m finding that completely hilarious. Madness approaches…