Doing research for a linguistics paper and came across this poem. I like it.

http://www.bartleby.com/104/84.html

ERE yet the giants of modern science had gone a-slumming in smelly slums,

And through the Ghettos and lazarettos had put in plumbing (and pulled out plums!)

When wily wizards in inky vizards employed their talents at homicide,

And poisoned goblets for faithless squablets by knightly gallants were justified;

When maids were fairest, and baths were rarest, and thaumaturgy was wrought by dames,

When courts were rotten and faith forgotten, and none but clergy could write their names—

When he who flouted the Church, or doubted, would find his neck fast in hempen ruff,

And saint and sinner thought eggs for dinner and beer for breakfast the proper stuff;

When men were scary of witch and fairy, of haunted castle, of spook and elf,

When every mixer of cough-elixir was thought a vassal of Nick himself;

When income taxes and prophylaxis and Comic Sections were yet unborn,

When Leagues of Nations and Spring Vacations and Fall Elections were held in scorn—

When all brave fellows would fight duellos with sword and dagger, with lance and mace,

When good men guzzled until, clean fuzzled, they'd reel and stagger about the place;

When pious journeys and jousts and tourneys brought high adventure and secret tryst,

When knives were many, but forks not any—'twas fist to trencher, and mouth to fist!—

Oh, men had chances for true romances, for fame and glory, and knightly acts...

(And childish quarrels and beastly morals, if song and story would stick to facts!)

Overanalyzing

I'm really hoping that this comic is representative of reality, because the paper I'm writing right now on the imagery of sun and storm in Richard II feels like total hogwash to me. And that's not for lack of effort. The scholarly essays I've read also feel like they're made up. I have the utmost respect for literature, but I'm soooo switching to science.

Change of Plans

It looks like I won't be able to go to Guatemala this spring as I'd planned. I'm still planning to go next fall, but for the time being I'm now faced with figuring out what I'm going to do at the U of A this spring.

I'm definitely dropping the English major down to a minor. It seems like that's a classic undergrad move, and admittedly while I plan to shift to a degree that doesn't require a minor (BS in Information Sciences and Technology) I'm also experiencing a proliferation of minors. My reasoning for this is simply a matter of "might as wells." Latin American Studies? Might a well! I'll complete that minor using only my lower-division Spanish credits and the credit I'll earn in Guatemala. Seems silly not to do it, right? And then there's English. At the end of this semester I'll have 15 upper-division credits in the English department and I'll only need 21 to get the minor. What's more, both Technical Writing and Linguistics have proven to be relevant to the IST degree anyway, especially linguistics. In fact, if I didn't have this sunk cost of 15 ENGL credits, I'd probably rather turn it into a Linguistics minor. That said, I'm pretty sure I can find two interesting and relevant classes SOMEWHERE in the English department.

My Linguistics class (Structure and Meaning of Words) is such an interesting class. When I got into it, I only had a foggy idea of what the field of Linguistics was all about. And I was actually hoping to gloss over things like phonology and human vocal anatomy so that we could get to language history. But it turns out even the aspects I thought would be sheer drudgery are fascinating. But then again, I have a tendency to be seduced by interesting classes and left wondering if I should be studying more of that field. It happened with logic, philosophy, astronomy, and now linguistics. At the very least, I'm going to try to find some more cross-listed courses between the English and Linguistics departments so that I can make the two remaining classes for an English minor as full of linguistics as possible.

Then I need to get another math out of the way. Hopefully I can do that over break at the community college. Pre-Calc I think it is? I need to send out some emails to advisors today.

Pledge to America

I'm all about balancing the budget. Supposedly, so is the tea party. However, theres quite a disconnect between what most people seem to mean when they say "cut spending" and the actual reality. Here's a breakdown of the total federal budget. It's probably the single most politically informative thing I've looked at all year. Look at it long and hard. Keep in mind, this is also before the costs (or savings, if you think that's going to happen) of the new healthcare bill kick in.

I'm not going to say that there isn't a lot of wasted money in all parts of that budget. But you really can't ignore that the biggest chunks are Military, Social Security, and Medicare. That's the current medicare, too, not Obamacare. So it's a good thing the tea partiers are willing to see those things drastically cut back, right? Oh wait, no, they want to keep all those things. And they want to keep the Bush tax cuts. And they want to cut taxes across the board.

I suppose the idea is that if you starve government programs for money, they're going to find ways to become leaner and meaner. If you subscribe to this hypothesis, then it makes sense to say "education is broken" and use this as a justification to cut school funding.

Alright, fair enough. But education is a tiny little block way over on the far right of that budget breakdown. What about the big chunks? You know, military spending? Social Security? It seems unlikely that the tea partiers, who have a heavy constituency of people benefitting from those programs, are going to be willing (or able!) to see those benefit checks get leaner. NPR's Guy Raz interviewed former Reagan advisor David Stockman the other day, who pointed out that the Republican's new Pledge To America (also their attempt to woo tea party votes) "exempts seniors" as well as defense spending from their proposed cuts. As Stockman points out in the interview, once you add all that up and include interest payments on the national debt, you've exempted two thirds of the federal budget from budget cuts.

Even if you somehow managed to cut spending in half on everything that isn't exempted (which includes most government agencies like Border Patrol, FBI, CDC, FDA, the Department of Transportation, as well as education) you'd still have an unsound budget and thats WITHOUT extending the tax cuts.

I'm not an expert on fiscal policy, but this just doesn't add up. Sure, the democratic plan seems to be to spend a lot and tax a lot. But the Pledge to America plan seems to be founded on the principle of having your cake and eating it too. So who do I vote for that has the guts to massively cut military spending and kick the chair out from under millions of retirees and medicare beneficiaries so we can ACTUALLY balance the budget?

Right. That's a terrible idea, and it will probably never happen. So maybe, at least, in the interest of fiscal responsibility, someone who isn't a Democrat should step and admit that extending the Bush Tax Cuts is a terrible idea too. The idea that America can be a superpower, have social programs like europe, and do it with the tax rate of Hong Kong is just a little far fetched for me. Oh, and don't tell me we can just get rid of those social programs unless you really mean it. That's Social Security, Medicare, and vet benefits.

Math and Physics

I have such a love/hate thing going on with math. Sometimes doing math is pretty exhilarating, like solving a sudoku puzzle or something. Other times I just want to pound my head against the wall because textbooks often throw you for a loop halfway through the lesson, and algebraic expressions are such a house of cards that it's difficult to find where you went wrong.

I just finished a lesson where algebra brushes up against physics, and I really enjoyed it. I'd also like to formally announce to the nobel prize committee that I've independently discovered Newton's inverse square law. So what if he preceded me by 4 centuries?

I'm actually only taking the class because I can't shake the feeling that math is something I should be pursuing. I never really excelled in it in high school, but I have such an interest in how all these numbers and symbols can be used to express the physical laws of the universe, understand them, and postulate about the unknown. I suppose that interest always been there, but I really owe a debt of gratitude to Kent Slinker for turning up to teach the class that I enrolled in to avoid taking the math class I'm taking now, and encouraging me to study more math. The unfortunate thing is that having a decent teacher is incredibly critical to me getting anywhere with math, and those are hard to find. Atticus Antonietti, who presides over the online class I'm currently in, is also really good. I guess that since it's not my major, I can just bide my time and enroll in classes with good teachers when they're available, and then in 2012 when I have an english degree and no prospects, I'll start my academic career in physics or something.