A foot of snow in Socorro

The weatherman predicted 2-4", but we got over a foot the morning of 12/05. First shot shows the bird feeders and birdseed bin in my backyard with foot-tall snow caps.

I cleared off the back half of my car so I could get some snow gear out of the trunk. This picture shows the depth of the snow on the car roof. The “Pica pole” is a little over a foot long; there is another 3/4" or so of metal past the 0" mark, so definitely over a foot.

Looking east along Campus Drive on the south side of Fitch and Driscoll, you can see more cars with serious snow caps. Note the depth of the snow on the roof of the pickup truck on the left.

Let our sorrows/Carve out hollows/For our happiness to fill.—John Hall

Three bangs for the Fourth

Some items from the mid-Aughts, some new ones. Let's start with a few neologisms.

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Oneiroplasty: Create your dreams. (JS)

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Dysmenorah: Crankiness during Hanukkah. (JS)

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These quotas are so arbitricial. (Arbitrary x artificial; JS 2011-1-13)

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Delorious (delightful x glorious; JS 2004-6-26)

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Glorgeous (glorious x gorgeous; JS 2004-7-24)

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Indicement (inducement x enticement; DJ on Radio Free Santa Fe)

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De-furred gratification. (JS, on the Shed-Ender 2006 for removing thatch from cats)

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Nobody knows you're a dog, on the Internet. (Thaddeus Bejnar)

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If there's a “Lighthouse for the blind,”, how come there isn't a “Foghorn for the deaf”? (Richard LeRoy)

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That's just icing on the gravy. (Richard LeRoy)

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Gotta watch both ends at the same time. (Thumper, to Bambi, on the ice)

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That Achy-Breaky song has turned country and western music into an ass-wiggling contest. (Waylon Jennings)

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Excuses and rarblizations [sic]. (Bad TV closed caption, probably for “rationalizations”.)

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“When I grow up, I want to be a musician.”

“Son, you can't do both.” (Anon., from the Christian Science Monitor)

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I dare you to make less sense! (Hank Venture)

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Done there, been that. (Joe Martinic)

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I've got things to place and goes to be! (JS, 2010-12-27)

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Talk to the booty, 'cause the hand's off duty! (Pat Buckley's 9-year-old grandson)

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We had to clean out the plastic dinosaur tray at Walmart. (Pat Buckley on entertaining grandchildren)

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Did you hear about the Amish woman who went wrong? She wanted two, Mennonite.

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Loan Sum Pawn (now-closed hock shop in Belen, NM)

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I've seen that look on his face before, but not at the table. (Woman who wishes to remain anonymous; of her husband; at Denver's Rioja restaurant; I've been there, the food is really that good.)

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Roger Melone: Is this tempo too fast for the clarinet?

Clarinetist: It's also difficult for the player.

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Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby. (Anon.)

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The Information Technology degree is for people who can't program but want to control the computers because there is money and power involved. (Pat Buckley)

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Real programmers can write in FORTRAN no matter what language they are using. (Pat Buckley)

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If your program is long enough to need a subroutine, Perl is the wrong language. (Brian Truitt)

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Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using rocks to sharpen sticks. (Thant Tessman, via Bill Weiss)

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A true friend will stab you in the front. (Oscar Wilde)

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That's the best one of that kind I never saw before in my life. (Bob Eveleth)

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Quantum mechanics: The dreams that stuff are made of. (Bumper sticker)

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Schroedinger's Cat: Wanted dead or alive!

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In the ballet of life, some people are the dancing potatoes. (JS 2010-12-8)

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Ormolu Cummerbund (band name, JS, Dec. 2010)

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There are only two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want. The other is getting it. (Oscar Wilde; found on a gravestone in the Eunice, NM, cemetery)

On ways of teaching and learning

This essay on instructional methodology is on my regular web, but you can leave comments here.

Updated 2011-07-04 with some feedback from Dr. Cormack.

Two rules for writers

This essay on being a writer is on my regular web site, but you can leave comments here.

John McPhee, my favorite technical writer

I never had specific training as a technical writer, just always wrote the documentation because nobody else wanted to. Reading widely and copiously, though, is my first recommendation for becoming a better writer, so I try to seek out the better nonfiction writers to inspire me.

There are a number of nonfiction writers whose work I enjoy and would hold up as good examples. Stephen Jay Gould in biology, Lewis Thomas in Medicine.

But John McPhee, columnist for the New Yorker, is my favorite of them all. When I was convalescing from my knee replacement last spring, I finally read his Annals of the Former World (ISBN 978-0-374-51873-8), a monster on the subject of geology.

I avoided geology in my college years. We had a choice of biology or geology, and at New Mexico Tech, the Geology Department is extremely tough, especially the undergraduate intro course. I figured if anyone could help remedy this large lacuna in my education, it'd be McPhee.

This guy has it all. The big picture. The thousand telling details. The human element and the accidents of history. But he also has a wicked gift for writing, especially explaining things in terms people can appreciate.

As I was reading Annals, one paragraph so impressed me that I had to stop and catch my breath. This is from page 121, as part of his general introduction to plate tectonics.

Almost all earthquakes are movements of the boundaries of plates—shallow earthquakes at the trailing edges, where the plates are separating and new material is coming in, shallow earthquakes along the sides, where one plate is ruggedly sliding past another (the San Andreas Fault), and earthquakes of any depth down to four hundred miles below and beyond the trenches where plates are consumed (Japan, 1923; Chile, 1960; Alaska, 1964; Mexico, 1985). A seismologist discovered that deep earthquakes under a trench had occurred on a plane that was inclined forty-five degrees into the earth. As ocean floors reach trenches and move on down into the depths to be consumed, the average angle is something like that. Take a knife and cut into an orange at forty-five degrees. To cut straight down would be to produce a straight incision in the orange. If the blade is tilted forty-five degrees, the incision becomes an arc on the surface of the orange. If the knife blade melts inside, little volcanoes will come up through the pores of the skin, and together they will form arcs, island arcs—Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, the New Hebrides, the Lesser Antilles, the Kurils, the Aleutians.

The boldfaced part just made my jaw hit the floor. What, structurally, is he doing there? The orange is a metaphor for the Earth, yes, but then what happens? It's a knife blade, but it's also a large geological structure, and it is melting.

One of the general principles that guides my own technical writing is that some people are verbal thinkers while some are more visual in their thinking, so pictures are a Good Thing. But here, McPhee doesn't need a picture; his words paint a clear picture that anyone can appreciate and visualize why island arcs form. A two-dimensional picture wouldn't work anyway. Better to let the reader use their three-dimensional imagination.