This World and Me

I grew up in a city called Dublin, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. If there is one remarkable thing about the topography of Ohio, it is precisely how unremarkable it is. I now live in the Pacific Northwest, and whenever I look out the window as I fly out from Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, I always stare for several minutes at the gorgeous diversity of geographic features, from the expansive Lake Washington to the countless inlets of the Puget Sound, from the Olympic Mountains to of course the towering peak of Mount Rainier. After dozing off for four hours, I arrive back in my home state of Ohio, look out the window and see... flatness. It is like the surface of a marble. No mountains, no lakes, no big forests. Just a seemingly endless array of alternating farmland and tiny woods, with the occasional town or village. If I am lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Columbus from 20,000 feet, I could probably count the number of tall skyscrapers on my hands. One unfortunate consequence of...

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" Often misattributed to Albert Einstein, this quote first appeared in Laurence J. Peter's  Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time  (1977). I used to sign all my emails with this.

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." —Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes , 1989

Circumlocution — the use of many words to say something that could be said more clearly and directly by using fewer words (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary) The definition above for the word circumlocution  carries a negative connotation. People who use unnecessarily wordy and indirect language to avoid getting to the point. We all know those people who do that. But there is an instance where circumlocution can actually be a valuable skill. Rather than thinking about it as refusing to "get to the point", what if you don't know how  to get to the point? When one learns a foreign language, one of the most useful skills they could utilize is circumlocution. In the context of a learning a foreign language, I define circumlocution as using known words to convey an idea that could have been more simply stated using unknown words. In a way, you are "going around the idea" to try to convey that idea. For example, if you are learning the German language and you wan...

We've all been in this situation. You accidentally leave your phone (or any other important item you would be saddened if you lost) in an obscure location you can't remember. When you finally remember where you left it, you desperately return to the location only to find that the phone isn't there! You are forced to assume that that wasn't where you had left it in the first place, and you proceed to search aimlessly. Sadly, here's what actually happened: somebody found your phone, realized that someone else had lost it, picked it up and tried to find its owner. Although their cause may have been noble, it was clearly in no way beneficial to you. Here's a funky method for dealing with finding items that other people lost: Don't do anything. Think about the thoughts that go through your mind immediately when you lose something: where was the last place I left it?  To find a lost object, most people will backtrack their day, highlighting possible areas w...