grammar girl: between you and me
When a song with a grammatically incorrect title becomes a smash hit, that’s a catastrophe. English teachers everywhere were surely gnashing their teeth as students sang along with “Between You and I” by Jessica Simpson in 2006. But she can be forgiven; it’s a hypercorrection heard sputtering from the mouths of many educated people.
The reason it’s wrong is that between is a preposition, and it’s a rule that pronouns following prepositions have to be in the objective case. Me is the objective pronoun; I is a subjective pronoun. Don’t worry about the details, just clear your mind of the song and memorize that the correct phrase is between you and me.
the paris review interview: nadine gordimer
Since 1953, when the first issue of The Paris Review appeared with an interview of E. M. Forster, the magazine’s Q&A encounters with the great writers of our times have come to be recognized as a sort of literary genre unto themselves: The Paris Review interview.
Nadine Gordimer (c) Dan Porges
There are other interviews that fascinate me more. Truman Capote’s, for instance. But the thing that caught my eye today was a question put to the South African writer, political activist and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. Did the isolation of her childhood help her become a writer?
This interview was conducted in two parts—in the fall of 1979 and in the spring of 1980.
the thin blue line. wonders of the solar system.
The Euro’s brother is an insanely talented artist. I have a theory that in a past life he painted whatever it was da Vinci painted over in that Milanese noodle hall. So, there’s that. In this life, he’s also a director. Watch one of his programs, The Thin Blue Line (Wonders of the Solar System), Sunday, 21:00, on BBC Two.
wolfram|alpha – artificial intelligence
Once, in an intimate moment, my sister looked at me and said:
“Don’t judge me.”
She followed this with:
“I think Donald Trump is Sexy.”
I didn’t, of course. Judge. How could I? Growing up, Walter Matthau was my Backstreet Boy. I also think Stephen Wolfram is all kinds of hot.
If you don’t already know, Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and its spawn: Wolfram|Alpha. Wolfram, the man, is quick to point out that Alpha’s not a search engine. Unlike Google, Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t just look up sites. Rather, Wolfram|Alpha is sort of like SkyNet. (It even sounds all SkyNet-y, huh?) It implements methods and models and algorithms that science and other areas have built up over the centuries to compute answers to questions in real time.
Search engines search what other people may have written down. Wolfram|Alpha uses built in knowledge, curating a zillion different sources of raw facts and data, to compute answers to specific questions. Eight million lines of Mathematica code, built by experts in many different fields (though it still maintains a strong science/math slant), to answer questions that use ordinary human language.
Fancy feat, eh?
one of mine
On Friday night I cried because I was so overwhelmed with packing and moving and packing some more and because The Euro broke the crystal plate my grandmother gave me as a wedding gift. He looked worse than I did, when it happened, and I know things are just things but…
I sat in the middle of the floor and bawled and thought about my grandmother for a goodly long time. Sometimes she forgets my name. She’s so hurt by it, and worried it will hurt me too…it’s more upsetting than the forgetting.
“You’re the smart one, who use to live with me. I can’t remember why. But Honey, I know you’re one of mine.”
the theory of everything
If I were born calm and, you know, smart, I would have wanted to be a physicist. It would have made for nice balance. But I wasn’t. I came into the world hyper and full of stress. So I write. It’s where I find my peace.
When I was a kid I loved Einstein, because he was funny and had cool hair; and the merry-go-round, because it made me feel like I was on Quantum Leap and I totally dug Scott Bakula. Like a mini collider, it’d spin you so fast the world would warp and then you’d be spat out against the ground like some odd little particle…with everything else still moving because time and space are relative to the position and velocity of different observers and you, having been slung ahead of yourself by a playground accelerator, are observing both from two places at once and neither your brain nor your body know quite how to cope. It’s a fabulous rush, but being pushed off your axis also makes for nauseous. That’s how I feel about physics. Like a kid just flung from a merry-go-round. Much as I’d love to, I can’t play with it too much or there’s a good probability my head will explode.
I sometimes get consumed with thinking of the collapsing and curvature of time and space – it’s my Walter Mitty life. Things like string theory and super symmetry excite me beyond belief, but they take a lot out of me as well. I’m not speaking metaphorically. I get breathless and all short-circuity just thinking about it. Not least because dark matter and fourth dimensions always seem to give rise to certain philosophical questions and as much as I’m a monotheist I’m a pantheist as well, two things which aren’t at all mutually exclusive, but which make for complicated brain work all the same. Not zen, my friend. Especially when you’re trying to live below the neck.
I’m not an elegant mathematician. I can get there, eventually, but not before I’m foaming at the mouth. And since it’s probably helpful to stay sane when you’re dealing with the theory of everything, I don’t think I could ever be a physicist. Not made the way I am. A ninja, maybe. But never a physicist.
