I bashed my head into the sloping ceiling a few hours ago with such force that the whack made me cry from the shock of the impact and the pain. And now I have a headache, a paper I want to finish tonight, and one I have to get very close to the minimum word limit (can’t finish it until I’ve visited the library tomorrow). This sucks.
A photo I took the other day - I was amazed by the contrast between the sunlit foreground (it’s a row of houses behind mine) and the ominous sky behind it. We got some proper thunder and lightning out of it, too. I like the cosy, cluttered look of the foreground paired with the cold, eerily calm background, too.
I’ve been stupidly busy just being busy, these past few days. I don’t know exactly how it happens, but suddenly I found myself talking like a diplomat to ensure that my house would keep its Internet, for example. More about that in a few days’ time. It will all be clear soon.
I’ve also been googling my arse off looking for a certain interpretation of Wordsworth’s Daffodils (or I wandered lonely as a cloud) for my 5000 word paper. I need a reading that ties the poem to the French Revolution, and although this interpretation is supposedly omnipresent, I can’t find it anywhere. *grumble* I’ve looked at the Internet, books about Wordsworth… hell, I even looked at what must be the single most useless journal in the world, the Wordsworth Circle journal. No luck.
I did manage to get out and go to the park on Sunday, though. The weather was gloriously warm, and the memorial gardens just stunning. I first walked around the whole park taking photos, and when I had done the rounds, I found myself a nice bench and read a book for a while. It’s such a good way to recharge the batteries and get ready for the week ahead that I think might have to make it a regular thing, weather permitting. The park is overrun by spring flowers at the moment, but I think I spotted a score of rose bushes too, which should give the gardens a whole new look come summer. I’ve uploaded a lot of photos from Sunday to my Flickr page, here. You could be seeing a lot more from these gardens in the future.
My mum gave me a plastic, hollow easter egg that she’d been given with her groceries at the local supermarket. It contained a disc of compressed soil and three bulbs. The two halves of the egg can be stacked to form an hourglass-shaped pot. The directions said to put the soil in the pot and add as much water as possible, which the soil would then go on to absorb over the course of ten minutes. In reality, it only took one or two minutes, and over the past few weeks, my lucky clover has been steadily growing. They started off as little pink, fluffy sticks poking through the soil.
I accidentally knocked the whole thing off the shelf it’s on one day, so one of the stems snapped off clean, and another is almost that way and trying to decide whether to live and mend itself or just give up altogether. There are two stems per bulb, though, and three bulbs, so I still have four happy, fuzzy stems left. I can’t wait for the flowers, but even without, they are great fun to look at from day to day.
It’s lucky clover, cause it has four leaves. That said, I’m pretty sure that any relation to actual clover is either wholly artificial or popular etomology. And with this little post about luck and clover, I will get back to writing my Psychology & Language paper. Would you believe it’s actually going quite well? If I make decent progress today, I might just reward myself with a trip to the memorial park I came across walking home when I got off the airport bus too early. Even in early April, it was an abundance of flowers, and the weather is fining up a bit now, so it seems the perfect time to pay it a proper visit.
I’ve spent the past few days processing the data from the bilingual experiment I designed and conducted at my old high school in the Netherlands. Some of the results so far are really interesting, although I doubt I could generalise them, since I had only a small pool of participants. Still, six participants per condition should roughly be significant, but this is just a pilot study, an assignment encouraging us to get out there and try something out.
The topic was left completely up to our imagination. I’ve always been very interested in bilingualism, especially bilingualism not acquired at a young age. What has surprised me is how much I enjoy getting back into linguistics, researching vague memories of how language works. I did a whole track of linguistic courses during my undergrad, but I wouldn’t dare call myself a linguist. I was taught by a linguistic superstar, and as much as I hated it at the time, his insistence we remember little details has really given me a sound grounding in the world of language.
But. I have always been terrified of carrying out my own research, and have taken the cop out route every single time. Literature reviews are much less scary. For this Psychology & Language course there was no way out. It turns out I’m actually quite enjoying it. What’s more, I’m writing on a topic that hasn’t really had any research devoted to it so far, so I’m pretty much just writing out my own ideas, explanations and conclusions. It’s quite cool, and it takes the pressure right off, because I can’t actually get it wrong.
In theory, anyway. HELP!
One of my classmates is from one of the Southern provinces of China. A long way away from Beijing, one would say. It didn’t stop her from bringing us all a three-part souvenir, though! We were collectively “aww”-ing away over the thoughtfulness of it.
We were all given a keyring with a mascotte of the Beijing Olympics, a custom-made stamp with our names (in Roman script - she went to the shop and said “I’ll write it out for you, just do them like this” - awesome) and a little red tin with red ink to go with it. It’s interesting how we were all drooling over the exoticism of the ink tin, when, as the course convenor put it, it probably said something boring in Chinese script such as “basic red ink, keep out of reach of children, do not consume”. Ha, foreigners are so easy to please.
‘Forget global warming, prepare for Ice Age.’
I’ve never really been on the global warming train. That’s not to say that I don’t believe in living an environmentally more sustainable life, I just don’t buy the scaremongering. In 2006, Antarctic ice was closer to South America than ever before, apparently. Sydney’s harbour used to be much further inland, or the water level much higher. These are all little facts like the ones we are bugged with on a daily basis, telling us to stock up on rafts for when the flood comes, but damn, make it a raft with a small footprint.
I can’t help but think there must be more tangible evidence that we are ruining the planet. Perhaps, though, people need to feel that their homes are under threat before they will take action. It would explain the scaremongering.
Anyway, personally, I’ve always found the theory that we are on the edge of a new Ice Age much more plausible. Research into past ice ages has shown that temperatures seem to rise before the inevitable chilling downfall. Now an Australian researcher has shown that after the 11 years long sun cycle that concluded last year, sun spot activity hasn’t flared back up, and between January 2007 and 2008, temperatures have gone down 0.7C, which apparently puts us back to 1930s temperatures, rather than on the brink of global warming catastrophe.
There is a good explanation of how sun spots influence temperatures on earth (it’s kind of counter-intuitive, so I’ll let quote it):
A sunspot is a region on the sun that is cooler than the rest and appears dark.
Some scientists believe a strong solar magnetic field, when there is plenty of sunspot activity, protects the earth from cosmic rays, cutting cloud formation, but that when the field is weak - during low sunspot activity - the rays can penetrate into the lower atmosphere and cloud cover increases, cooling the surface.
Sun cycles have been known for ages, are well-researched, and visible. And according to austronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman, something is off with them. In an article in The Australian, he writes:
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.
There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do.
[…]
The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.
The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.
I’d say we’re in for a bigger surprise than man-made mayhem.
I like the factuality of his article. I enjoy the lack of theatrics, with Chapman simply stating the facts and concluding that:
We cannot really know, but my guess is that the odds are at least 50-50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades. The probability that we are witnessing the onset of a real ice age is much less, perhaps one in 500, but not totally negligible.
As expressed in the quote above, Chapman may be wrong. What’s more, he realises it. I think we ought to keep in mind his closing statement, though. ‘In the famous words of Oliver Cromwell, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”‘ I find it refreshing that a scientist (who’s actually studied to talk about these kind of things, instead of just having a random MSc and calling it a day) is putting forth an article that shows open mindedness as far as the issue of global warming goes. These days, it’s not PC to have doubts about global warming theories, but I’m glad there are still people out there subscribing to a proper, unprejudiced scientific notion.
Now, I am no geophysicist or meteorologist, so my opinion is worth about as much as the American dollar at present, but have a look at these two articles and see what you think. I think it’s chillingly convincing.
Once again, life’s sweet irony finds a way to saturate my being. I had a stress management workshop at uni today, and spent the entire day freaking out about the impending departure of my Internet. You see, two of my housemates are moving out in May, and supposedly, there was no way the girl whose name is on the Internet bills could put it in my or my other remaining housemate’s name. I’ve spent the entire day spending £11.50 on the phone to either my other housemate Sarah, or the Virgin help desk people. Thankfully, I hit the jackpot as far as help desk people are concerned today, and everything was sorted by 5:37pm.
I am now so knackered that the 1000 words of essay I promised myself I’d write each day seem like all of Venice’s bridges too far. I have managed 200, so far. My brain is hurting and my stomach upset, but my God am I managing that stress. The fact that I haven’t dropped dead yet should be testament to the workshop’s glorious effectivity.
Yes, I’m still writing those essays. And every now and then I wake up and realise I’m suffering from a true case of ‘fried brain’. I never expected it to have the same effect on Microsoft Word, though!
I was sorely disappointed with myself yesterday, because as soon as I sat down to do some work, I had a fit of narcolepsy that could only be resolved by sleep. I didn’t really get a lot of work done. An added disadvantage was that I hardly slept last night because I’d slept during the day.
So in an effort to resolve all that, I got up at 9 this morning (aimed for 8, but that seemed foolish given how little I had slept), and I’m getting work done, with sensible study breaks every hour or so. And of course, lunch. It’s high time for some pan pizzas, so I’m going to publish this and head to the kitchen.
First one of my teachers (who is also an absolute genius) said that, actually, he felt we had made some real progress as far as cognitive poetics goes. Sure, perhaps we didn’t feel perfectly comfortable with the material yet, but as an earlier discussion proved, we were certainly able to talk about concepts we’d never even heard of, much less understood, at the start of the semester.
Then my dad told me about a teaching course he took part in at his work. They were being taught about techniques and different learning styles and so on, especially focusing on research by a man named Kolb, who came up with four distinctive learning styles that would cover just about everyone. As future teachers, the people in that classroom would have to anticipate several of them in their students. It sounded like the workshop was quite fun.
At the end, the coach told them about people - in this case, future teachers - who will feel sick for days leading up to an (teaching) event. Dad said that it immediately reminded him of me, and shared some of the strategies he was told about that would combat such thinking. No one knows everything.
In short, I think the universe is trying to tell me there is no need to feel like projectile vomiting continually for the next three weeks or so.
Update: If that doesn’t work, I will just have to keep this in mind, just like Élena from French Toast Girl, who made it a beautifully colourful reminder.