First comment commentary of 2022

Firstly, it's still WTF cold here, though they say it's going to warm up soon. Here's one of the nice kitchen window frost patterns.

I think I'm going to try to make comment commentary a more regular feature, rather than waiting for several to pile up, and then try to remember whatever it was that I was going to say about them. Lots of times a comment will inspire a blog. Maybe it will inspire more reader comments. (hint hint)

So starting off the year is Janice from yesterday!

Great musings and some really lovely images, Keith. My favourite photos are the bees (love the colour and focus on detail), the first two water shots (which make me want to go buy an ND filter), and the red flowers (what are they anyway? daylilies?). Thanks for always being here when I get round to catching up my blog reading.

As for comfortable and uncomfortable changes - truly, I'm okay with evolving notions of gender roles and identity, and the need to change our use of language to accommodate them (though it bugs me so many young people think no one has ever considered these issues before) - but I'm less sanguine about unnecessary grammatical changes resulting from poor teaching or laziness or I don't know what else. e.g. "Excited for" in place of "excited by" and "excited about"; "less" in place of "fewer". To my mind, such changes serve no useful purpose and simply make the English language much less precise than it used to be. Mind you, I feel the same about not teaching kids cursive writing. I know it's mostly not needed since people rely on electronic devices so much now, but it comes in darn handy when you have to rely on pen and paper since printing is (for most anyway) so much slower. And then, of course, there's the magical connection between brain and hand many of us feel when we write by hand rather than on a computer. It would feel like a great loss to me if I couldn't write by hand anymore.

Grrrr. Can you tell I'm getting old and cranky?

Anyway, thanks again for the post!

Thank you for reading and commenting! You can be sure that bees will be appearing on the blog again, when they appear again. Right now I hope they are all snug in a hive they can keep warm.

Yes, those are lilies, but Linda isn't sure which variety. They are fairly new, and seem to like the morning sun on the east side of the house. I love the rich orange red.

If you get an ND filter, don't get a variable one. I had one, and it adds a weird X shaped shadow from polarization. The one I've got is PhotoRepublik ND2000, which is about as dark as you can get, I think. It was about $95. My reasoning for getting the darkest one is that it's always possible to tweak other settings to make the most of the light to get the effect you want. Sometimes with lighter ones you can't get the exposure time you want. I don't use it a lot, but sometimes I'm in the mood. The hardest decision is if you want one that screws onto a specific lens size (mine is 77mm) or a rig that fits over any lens and pokes out beyond because it's square. You can get them graduated, so they're light on top and gradually get darker. I call that trouble waiting to happen, and getting the same effect in Lightroom is trivial.

I'm not so much a purist about grammar rules. Many of these were made up out of the whole cloth as the language evolved. Some are holdovers from Latin and don't make as much sense in English. Part of the problem is that spoken and formally written English are diverging. I feel sorry for people learning English as a second language. Why doesn't food and good rhythm (which as an aside is one of the words I absolutely loath because it's so hard to spell) ? 

Consider:

food, mood, rood, (dude, nude, rude) (yes, rood is a real word)

good, hood, wood

I blame the Great Vowel Shift. Don't get me started on aluminum. 

I draw the line at emoticons and icons. We developed literacy for a reason; written words were more precise than some symbol. Now we seem to be going back to that. 

Rather than nailing down English into a particular form, I'd really like to do some rationalization of the alphabet. You've probably read the piece that starts by proposing changes to spelling, and modifying the spelling of the piece as it goes along. If you pay attention it's still readable at the end. There's probably a reason island is spelled like that, but whatever it is, it's stupid. 

I remember once in grade 3 with the teacher writing "GHOTI" on the blackboard and asking how it was pronounced. That the correct answer was "FISH" blew my mind. Don't ask me to reproduce the reasoning, it's left as an exercise for the reader. We ought to be able to look at a word and know how to pronounce it, and we should all agree about it. (As a digression, that you don't know how to pronounce a word, doesn't mean that it's unsafe in food.) Vice versa as well, hearing a word pronounced ought to lead to the correct spelling. Having C and S make the same noise sometimes, and C and K, probably adds a year to some children's literacy efforts.

While I'm on about it, I'd like to see the actual shapes for numbers and both upper and lower case letters be unique, and no rotations allowed. So l and 1 (ell and one) are right out, as would be 7 and L. I think 8 and B are suspect and probably mess up the dyslexic. d and 6 and 9 and g and p and q should be reconsidered. 2 and 5 and S and Z are a bit dodgy. T and F could use some clarity. k and h might be ok, but are similar in some fonts. 

I hear you on cursive writing. I struggled with learning it, and the best anyone said about mine was that it was messy. "A messy mind makes for messy writing" was said to me by one teacher as they handed back a test. There were many much less kind words used. Technically, I suppose I can still write in cursive. Hmmm. Maybe I should try it. Here's a short sample of it, good thing it isn't any longer. 

Much more than that and legibility (such as it is) starts to suffer big time. I remember one of my office roomies who had amazingly neat handwriting, and she was nearly as fast as the person talking. Mostly now I print, and even that looks a little like a secret code. So much unlike this guy, creating works of art with a pen on paper. 

Learning to type was life changing. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. That high school typing course I took was probably the most useful and valuable course I've ever taken in my life. If I need to take a lot of notes, my preferred way is on a keyboard, and not an iPad. I tend to rest my fingers on the keys. Typing ought to be taught in early grade school, if computers are going to be a thing in our lives. Dare I say the word Dvorak?

The damnyouautocorrect still screws me up though. I can type a word wrong, know I've typed it wrong, and know how many backspaces I need to do, do them, and retype what I wanted, all without looking at the keyboard or the screen. Except now the word I typed isn't there anymore, it's been changed to something I didn't want in the middle of me fixing it.

And yet, I kind of like doodling by hand, with pen or pencil on paper, especially if I need to sketch something out, or a diagram needs to happen. I tried a number of the iPad apps and never really liked them. For a while I had a slate computer, and it could actually decipher my handwriting pretty good. There is that connection between the hand and brain when writing something. I think it's because using the pen makes you slow down your thinking a little. It's harder to erase your thoughts, so thinking about what is to be said first is faster than writing and correcting. Which I do typing a lot. 

Do I understand you correctly, cursive writing is no longer taught in school? I'm almost afraid to ask what has taken it's place. Some of what I've seen of how math is taught is absolutely incomprehensible to me. School as we know it was invented so as to educate people just well enough to run machinery and follow instructions. Before that, education was for the wealthy and upper classes, and was taught by tutors. 

We know the current education system doesn't work well anymore. We know there are better ways of doing it. Look at the efforts to go to year round schooling, as opposed to giving kids 2 months to forget everything they'd ever learned. (I specialized in this.) Some people think the change is unnatural and against the order of things, but kids are no longer needed to help with the crops in summer. Rather than lumping kids the same age together and progressing them together, they ought to be able to move forward at their on speed, subject by subject, getting specific help where needed. We know computers and on line learning are good for some things, we should take advantage, and use human teachers where that works best.

And if we're going to do public schools, let's do them right. The solution to problems is not to take your kids out of school, it's to improve the schools. Public tax dollars should not go to private schools. There shouldn't be any subsidies or tax breaks of any kind for private schools. The parents who want to send their kids to a private school should be paying the entire public school part of the property tax, plus whatever the private school charges. The private school would send the kids to the local public school to write whatever exams are required, and the public school grants the diplomas. How's this for an idea, requiring elected officials to send their kids to public schools. Perhaps that would encourage them to properly fund the schools and ensure they're a great place for kids and the staff.

But then, I'm old and cranky too. Hope you enjoyed the rant!

Of the Day

Driftwood

Peony

Lily