You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 28th, 2007.
So I’ve been reading A New Kind of Science
In Chapter 2, Wolfram introduces a fairly simple 2-dimensional cellular automata (one spatial dimension, one temporal dimension). The temporal dimension can be plotted as another spatial dimension producing a nice little spreadsheet style graph. Each cell of the graph can be considered a bit. Depending on whether the bit is set, the cell is either shaded or not. So the single line in the spatial dimension contains some initial setting. Let’s say there is one single bit set in the middle of the line, so it might look like this:
000000000010000000000
A recent journey through the Steel City. And yes I am a menace to public safety. This is downtown, which people from the ‘Burgh pronounce [dɑ:ntɑ:n] instead of the Standard American English [daʊn'taʊn]. If you’re not familiar with IPA, it’s more like donton. But not quite. It’s amusing.
Pittsburgh English is also sometimes called Pittsburghese, a term that I’m not especially fond of. But there is definitely a difference here. Two of the biggest things that people will notice are the use of a the word redd up, meaning to straighten up. That word is actually of Scots-Irish descent. My original suspicion was from the German aufraeumen, but that’s wrong. Pennsylvania Dutch has a strong influence in other parts of Pennsylvania, so it was the obvious starting point. Also, the verb need is used as the passive auxiliary so whereas in Standard American English (and most other dialects of English), you might say
The room needs to be vacuumed.
or
The room needs vacuuming.
Pittsburghers will say
The room needs vacuumed.
Most speakers reject this as ungrammatical. Interestingly, this Pittsburgh dialect also crops up all over Pennsylvania, but not so much in Philadelphia. My wife, who is from the York area (sort of East-South-Central PA), says these things also. They all sound perfectly grammatical to me now as I’ve grown accustomed to hearing them, but I don’t actually say them. (Yet?)
Rube Goldberg devices are quite fascinating. However, whenever I see one in practice (below), I am nagged the entire time by A) worry that something minor will go wrong, causing failure and a lot of work; B) wondering about how much time this wasted; and C) who is the person who has that kind of time, patience and space in their home to devote so much real estate to something ultimately pointless. That said, they are freaking cool. This is by far the most elaborate one I’ve seen that’s actually real and not produced by people getting paid a lot of money. Of course there is the famous, much more elaborate Blue Ball Machine, which has been known to captivate many a mind (hat tip for first showing me years ago to Josh). Another crazy Rube Goldberg device below the jump.
