Random Intellingence IV

1. Metafiction is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction. It is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually, irony and self-reflection. Metafiction is primarily associated with Modernist and Postmodernist literature, but is found at least as early as Cervantes‘ Don Quixote and Chaucer’s 14th Century Canterbury Tales.
   Some common metafictive devices include:
   • A work of fiction within a fiction
   • A novel about a writer writing a novel
   • A novel about a reader reading a novel
   • A story addressing the specific conventions of story, such as title, paragraphing or plots.
   • A non-linear novel, which can be read in any order other than from beginning to end
   • Narrative footnotes, which continue the story while commenting on it
   • A novel wherein the author (not merely the narrator) is a character
   • A movie in which a character reads a fictional story
   • A movie or television show in which a character begins humming, whistling, or listening to (on a radio, etc), the show or movie’s theme song
   • A parallel novel which has the same setting and time period as a previous work, and many of the same characters, but is told from a different perspective
   • A work of fiction directly referencing another work that internally references the first work.
   • A story that anticipates the reader’s reaction to the story.
   • Characters who do things because those actions are what they would expect from characters in a story.
   • Characters who express awareness that they are in a work of fiction
   • A real pre-existing piece of fiction X, being used within a new piece of fiction Y, to give the illusion that Y’s fictional world is “our world”
   • A story where the author is not a character, but interacts with the characters.
   • A dialogue between two characters who interact within the dialogue with the author himself, who enters the dialogue he is writing as a character created by him.
2. Betty Boop is an animated cartoon character appearing in the Talkartoon and Betty Boop series of films produced by Max Fleischer and released by Paramount Pictures. In keeping with common practice, Natwick made his new character an animal, in this case, a French poodle. The animator redesigned her in 1932 to be recognizably human in the cartoon Any Rags. Her floppy poodle ears became hoop earrings, and her poodle fur became a bob haircut. She appeared in ten cartoons as a supporting character, a flapper girl with more heart than brains. Betty Boop is noteworthy for being the first cartoon character to fully represent a sexual woman. Other female characters of the same period showed their panties regularly, like Minnie Mouse, but didn’t have a full caricature of a woman’s form. Betty, however, reveled in her sexuality. She wore short dresses and a garter belt. Her breasts were prominent, and she showed her cleavage. In her cartoons, other characters try to sneak peeks at her while she’s changing.
3. Ethel Merman (16 January 1908 – 15 February 1984) was a Tony Award- and Grammy Award-winning American star of stage and film musicals, well known for her powerful voice and vocal range, often hailed by critics as “The Queen of the Broadway stage”. Merman was mentioned in the Broadway musical The Producers. During the song “Springtime for Hitler“, Hitler says the line: “Heil myself, Watch my show! I’m the German Ethel Merman, don’t ya know!” Merman had a cameo appearance in the movie Airplane! when a combat veteran suffering from “severe shell-shock” believed he was Ethel Merman. During the course of the joke she sang “Everything’s Coming Up Roses“.
4. Annie Oakley (13 August 1860 – 3 November 1926) b. Phoebe Ann Mosey was an American sharpshooter and exhibition shooter. Oakley’s amazing talent and luck led to a starring role in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which propelled her to become the first American female superstar. Using a .22 caliber rifle at 90 feet (27 m), Oakley reputedly could split a playing card edge-on and put five or six more holes in it before it touched the ground. The 1946 Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun is very loosely based on her life. The original stage production starred Ethel Merman, who also starred in the 1966 revival.
   In 1903, the newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, published a false story that Oakley had been arrested for stealing to support a cocaine habit. Annie Oakley spent much of the next six years winning 54 of 55 libel lawsuits against newspapers. She collected less in judgments than were her legal expenses, but to her, a restored reputation justified the loss of time and money. Annie continued to set records into her 60s, and she also engaged in extensive, albeit quiet, philanthropy for women’s rights and other causes, including the support of specific young women that she knew. She embarked on a comeback, and intended to star in a movie. In a 1922 shooting contest in Pinehurst, North Carolina, sixty-two-year-old Annie hit 100 clay targets straight from the 16 yard mark. Her health declined in 1925. Annie Oakley died on 3 November 1926, of pernicious anemia, at the age of 66 and was buried in Brock Cemetery^[10] in Greenville, Ohio. Her husband, Frank Butler, was so crushed by her death that he stopped eating. He died just 20 days later. After her death it was discovered that her entire fortune had been spent on her family and her charities.
5. William II or Wilhelm II (born Prince Frederick William Albert Victor of Prussia; German: Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm Albert Viktor von Preußen) (27 January 1859–4 June 1941) was the last German Emperor and King of Prussia (German: Deutscher Kaiser und König von Preußen), ruling both the German Empire and Prussia from 15 June 1888 to 9 November 1918. It remains unclear how large a role William actually played in leading Germany into the First World War. William is often referred to as The Kaiser in the United Kingdom.
   Traumatic breech birth left him with a withered left arm due to Erb’s Palsy, which he tried with some success to conceal. In many photos he carries a pair of white gloves in his left hand to make the arm seem longer, or has his crippled arm on the hilt of a sword or clutching a cane to give the effect of the limb being posed at a dignified angle.
   When war came about in 1914 William sincerely believed that he was the victim of a diplomatic conspiracy set up by his late uncle, Edward VII, in which Britain had actively sought to “encircle” Germany through the conclusion of the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904 and a similar arrangement with Russia in 1907. This is indicative of the fact that William had a highly unrealistic belief in the importance of “personal diplomacy” between European monarchs, and could not comprehend that the very different constitutional position of his British cousins made this largely irrelevant.

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Random Intelligence III

1. The Fermi Paradox is a physical paradox that was brought to light by a simple question posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi when speculating about the existence of technologically advanced civilizations within the observable universe, and exactly how common they would be.
   

   The belief that the universe contains many technologically advanced civilizations, combined with our lack of observational evidence to support that view, is inconsistent. Either this assumption is incorrect (and technologically advanced intelligent life is much rarer than we believe), our current observations are incomplete (and we simply have not detected them yet), or our search methodologies are flawed (we are not searching for the correct indicators).

   Those who believe that the lack of such overt evidence is a conclusive argument for the non-existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization within communication distance of earth refer to this lack of evidence as the Fermi principle.

2. The mediocrity principle is the notion in the philosophy of science that there is nothing special about Earth, and by implication the human race. It is a Copernican principle, used either as a heuristic about Earth’s position or a philosophical statement about the place of humanity.
3. A heuristic is a particular technique of directing your attention in learning, discovery, or problem-solving. (Greek eureka: ευρίσκω: “I find.”)
   The term was introduced in the 4th century by Pappus of Alexandria.The mathematician George Pólya popularized heuristic in the twentieth century in his book How to Solve It.Some commonplace heuristics, all from How to Solve It:
   If you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture.
   If you can’t find a solution, try assuming that you have a solution and seeing what you can derive from that (”working backward”).
   If the problem is abstract, try examining a concrete example.
   Try solving a more general problem first (the “inventor’s paradox”: the more ambitious plan may have more chances of success).
   Lexical note: The name of the topic is heuristic (not “heuristics”); a particular technique of directing your attention toward discovery is a heuristic, two or more of these are heuristics, and the adjective for “pertaining to how something is discovered” is heuristic.
4. A lexicon is usually a list of words together with additional word-specific information, i.e., a dictionary. Lexicon is a word of Greek origin (λεξικόν) meaning vocabulary. When linguists study the lexicon, they study such things as what words are, how the vocabulary in a language is structured, how people use and store words, how they learn words, the history and evolution of words, types of relationships between words as well as how words were created.
5. In linguistics, lexicon has a slightly more specialized definition, as it includes the lexemes used to actualize words. Lexemes are formed according to morpho-syntactic rules and express sememes. In this sense, a lexicon organizes the mental vocabulary in a speaker’s mind: First, it organizes the vocabulary of a language according to certain principles (for instance, all verbs of motion may be linked in a lexical network) and second, it contains a generative device producing (new) simple and complex words according to certain lexical rules. For example, the suffix ‘-able’ can be added to transitive verbs only such that we get ‘read-able’ but not ‘*cry-able’. (Though exceptions exist to this rule: one can certainly imagine a ’sleepable mattress’ or the expression, ‘Sure, that’s workable.’)Furthermore an individual’s lexical knowledge (or lexical concept) is that person’s knowledge of vocabulary.
6. Morphology is a sub discipline of linguistics that studies word structure. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, any English speaker can see that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers can also recognize that these relations can be formulated as rules that can apply to many, many other pairs of words. Dog is to dogs just as cat is to cats, or encyclopædia is to encyclopædias; dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rule in the first case is plural formation; in the second case, a transitive verb and a noun playing the role of its object can form a word. Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies such rules across and within languages.The term was coined by August Schleicher in 1859: Für die Lehre von der Wortform wähle ich das Wort “Morphologie” (”for the science of word formation, I choose the term ‘morphology’”, Mémoires Acad. Impériale 7/1/7, 35).
7. In English grammar, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a subject and one or more objects. Transitive verbs that are able to take both a direct object and an indirect object are called ditransitive; an example is the verb give above. Verbs that require a single object are called monotransitive.
   Verbs that don’t require an object are called intransitive, for example the verb to sleep. Since you cannot “sleep” something, the verb acts intransitively. Verbs that can be used in a transitive or intransitive way are called ambitransitive; an example is the verb eat, since the sentences I am eating (with an intransitive form) and I am eating an apple (with a transitive form that has an apple as the object) are both grammatical.
   There are languages which distinguish verbs based on their transitivity, which suggests that this is a salient linguistic feature. However, the definition of transitive verbs as those which have one object is not universal and is not used in grammars of many languages.
8. Polish (język polski, polszczyzna) is the official language of Poland. Polish is the main representative of the Lechitic branch of the Western Slavic languages. It originated in the areas of present-day Poland from several local Western Slavic dialects, most notably those spoken in Greater Poland and Lesser Poland.

   Polish was once a lingua franca in various regions of Central and Eastern Europe, mostly due to the political, cultural, scientific and military influence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Although no longer having as great an influence outside of Poland, due in part to the dominance of the Russian language, it is still sometimes spoken or at least understood in western border areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania as a second language. It shares some vocabulary with the languages of the neighboring Slavic nations, most notably with Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Czech and Slovakian.

9. A lingua franca is any language widely used beyond the population of its native speakers. The de facto status of lingua franca is usually “awarded” by the masses to the language of the most influential nation(s) of the time. Any given language normally becomes a lingua franca primarily by being used for international commerce, but can be accepted in other cultural exchanges, especially diplomacy. Occasionally the term lingua franca is applied to a fully established formal language; thus formerly it was said that French was the lingua franca of diplomacy.

   The origin of the term lingua franca is Latin (literally “Frankish language”), derived from the medieval Arab and Muslim use of the ethnonym “Franks“ as a generic term for Europeans during the period of the Crusades.

10. An ethnonym (Gk. ethnos, ‘tribe’, + onuma, ‘name’) is the name of an ethnic group, whether that name has been assigned by another group (ie. an exonym), or self-assigned (ie. an autonym). For example, the ethnically dominant group in Germany is the Germans, an exonym carried into English from Latin; the Germans refer to themselves with the autonym “Deutsch”.

    As language evolves, ethnonyms which were at one time acceptable become offensive. Examples include Gypsy (Roma) and (perhaps the most notable example in English) negro/colored (African American). Other examples of ethnonym-turned-ethnic slur in history include Punic, Vandal, Barbarian, San, Lapp and Philistine. Some are accepted for a time but still offensive (slants (Asians), gooks (Vietnamese), niggers (African Americans), and the contemporary towelhead (Arabian); some of these (nigger, for instance) are not offensive when used self-referentially within the group.

    In English, ethnonyms are generally derived through suffixation. See Demonym for a much more detailed explanation of this process.

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Random Intelligence II

1. The term “dramedy” first came into use in the mid-1980s to describe a new wave of similarly genre-blurring series such as Moonlighting, The Wonder Years, and Hooperman. It appears in an early Usenet post [1] in January 1990.
2. The first television show to incorporate a laugh track was The Hank McCune Show in 1950.
3. Canada is governed as a parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, Canada is a federation of ten provinces with three territories. Initially constituted in 1867, the country’s constitution was patriated in 1982 from the United Kingdom.Canada’s Prime Minister, currently Paul Martin, recently lost a vote of non-confidence in the Canadian House of Commons, which required the dissolution of Parliament. A federal election has been called for January 23, 2006.
   As of December 2005, its official population estimate is approximately 32.4 million ^[1].
4. The name Viking is a borrowed word from the native Scandinavian term for the Norse warriors who raided the coasts of Scandinavia, the British Isles, and other parts of Europe from the late 8th century to the 11th century. Vikings traveled to the west and Varangians, who were best known as the Varangian Guards of the Byzantine emperors, to the east. This period of European history (generally dated to 793 - 1066 AD) is often referred to as the Viking Age.The word “Viking” was introduced to the English language with romantic connotations in the 18th century. Today, somewhat controversially, the word is also used as a generic adjective, referring to the Viking Age Scandinavians. The medieval Scandinavian population, in general, is more properly referred to as Norse.
5. The Blòt was the pagan Germanic sacrifice to Norse gods and Elves. The word is related to the English word bless and they are derived from blood, an important component in the rites.The verb blòta meant to “strengthen” and the intention was to strengthen the powers (gods and Elves). The most powerful means was the sacrificed object or being. It was usually animals and in particular pigs and horses. The meat was boiled in large cooking pits with heated stones, either indoors or outdoors. The blood was considered to contain special powers and it was sprinkled on the statues of the gods, on the walls and on the participants themselves.
   When they were drunk, the participants believed they felt the power of the gods (see sumble).
6. Symbel (from Proto-Germanic *sumlan “banquet”, continuing *sm-lo-, i.e. “congregation”, see copulative a) was an important Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian Blòt ritual drinking feast in which mystical revelation was achieved through drinking alcohol, usually mead.
7. Icelandic (íslenska) is a North Germanic language spoken in Iceland.Written Icelandic has changed relatively little since the 13th century. As a result of this, and of the similarity between the modern and ancient grammar, modern speakers can still understand, more or less, the original sagas and Eddas that were written some eight hundred years ago. This ability is sometimes mildly overstated by Icelanders.The Icelandic alphabet is notable for its retention of two old letters which no longer exist in the English alphabet: Þ (thorn) and Ð (eth or edh), representing the voiceless and voiced “th” sounds as in English thin and this respectively.

   The preservation of the Icelandic language is taken seriously by the Icelanders –rather than borrow foreign words for new concepts, new Icelandic words are diligently forged for public use.

   Icelandic does not have any dialect differences that can cause misunderstanding.

8. The letter Þ (minuscule : Þ), which is also known as thorn or Þorn is a letter in the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic alphabets. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with th. The letter is called “thorn” in Anglo-Saxon and thurs (giant) in Scandinavia.  It has the sound of either a voiceless interdental fricative, like ‘th’ as in the English word “thick”, or a voiced dental fricative, like ‘th’ as in the English word “the.”The letter was used in writing Middle English before the invention of the printing press. William Caxton, the first printer in England, brought with him type made in Continental Europe, which lacked thorn, yogh, and eth. He substituted the letter Y in place of thorn. This was not an arbitrary choice on his part: in some manuscripts of the earlier 1400s the letters Y and thorn were identical. In fact Y in place of thorn is still seen on gravestones and in the stock prefix “Ye olde…”

   The definite article spelled with Y for thorn is often jocularly or mistakenly pronounced “yee” or mistaken for the archaic nominative case of you, written ye.

   Þ is the only Latin alphabet equivalent to the Greek letter Theta (?,?).

9. Some credit the printing press with giving Europe the technological and communication edge over Eastern countries in the end, one of the major questions in world history.
   Because of the printing press, authorship became more meaningful. It was suddenly important who had said or written what, and what the precise formulation and time of composition was. This allowed the exact citing of references, producing the rule, “One Author, one work (title), one piece of information” (Giesecke, 1989; 325). Before, the author was less important, since a copy of Aristotle made in Paris might not be identical to one made in Bologna. For many works prior to the printing press, the name of the author was entirely lost.
10. A goldsmith is a metalworker who specializes in working with precious metals, usually to make jewelry. Goldsmiths must be skilled in forming metal, through filing, soldering, forging, casting and polishing metal.At one time, the name was synonymous with banker, since they dealt in gold and had sufficient security for safe storage of valuable items.

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Random Intelligence I

I have decided to create a new game/series. This one is called “Random Intelligence.” The point is for me to provide you with five to ten new (to me) facts, figures, or stories. These need not be particularly rare, important, or obvious, but interesting and true. The goal is to cover the huge gulf that is my ignorance of the world around me with a few random facts that I can throw out if I ever have to discuss these in public.

If you still don’t get it, you’ll catch on soon enough. Watch:

1. About 89.5% of the people of Romania are ethnic Romanians, a group that— in contrast to its Slav or Hungarian neighbors — traces itself to Latin-speaking Romans, who in the second and third centuries A.D. conquered and settled among the ancient Dacians, a Thracian people. As a result, the Romanian language, although containing elements of Slavic, Turkish, and other languages, is a Romance language related to, among others, Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese.
2. The South African Constitution provides that children under 18 have a right to be protected from work that is exploitative, hazardous or otherwise inappropriate for their age, detrimental to their schooling, or detrimental to their social, physical, mental, spiritual or moral development. The term ‘work’ is not limited to work in so-called economic activities (e.g. paid employment) but includes chores or household activities in the child’s household (such as collecting wood and fuel), where such work is exploitative, hazardous, inappropriate for their age or detrimental to their development.
3. Turkey borders eight countries: Greece and Bulgaria to the northwest; Georgia, Armenia and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan and to the northeast; Iran to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the south.
4. The title Marquess of Winchester was created in 1551 in the Peerage of England, making it the oldest English (and British) Marquessate still in existence. Therefore, the holder is considered the Premier Marquess of England. The Marquess of Winchester, incidentally, is the only Marquess in the Peerage of England without a higher title; all other Marquesses in that Peerage are also Dukes.
5. Humans have an estimated 100,000 billion or 10^14 cells

Last Year: Wish List
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