The funny thing is, the Coca-Cola Company officially insists that the name "Coca-Cola" is just a whimsical piece of alliteration and has (and NEVER had) any relation to the ingredients. This is expediency. The name came from two main ingredients--the coca leaf and the kola nut, which provided cocaine and caffeine, respectively. Both of these are still used in Coca-Cola today; the coca leaf is "decocainized", using a process I'm not familiar with. (They had to change it in the early 20th century because otherwise they would have had to label Coke as a patent medicine, and pay extra taxes. They started denying that cocaine was ever in it later, when it became bad press. If you take the tour of the plant in Atlanta, the tour guides will earnestly tell you that there was NEVER any cocaine in Coca-Cola.)
In Mark Pendergrast's excellent book, For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, he recounts an interview with a higher-up at Coca-Cola who told him that the whole strength of the company lies in the brand. I'm paraphrasing: "I could just tell you the formula, and you could make and sell Coke of your own, even telling people that you're using our formula--and no one would buy it. Because it wouldn't be Coke."
So his argument is that the strength of the product is in the name, the color scheme, and the package design; all of which are trademarked. (Unlike the formula, which is "secret.") Considering the Coca-Cola Company essentially wrote the US trademark laws, I'm not surprised they play to their strengths.
>Unless you lock your kid in the basement, he's going to be raised, whether you like it or not, by plenty of other people.
But mainly you.
There's a lot of evidence that seems to show this isn't true. Peer pressure has a hugely greater effect on children than parental pressure. This may be because parents are authority figures, and most children resent and resist authority figures; while on the other hand, most childen long for acceptance from the peer group, and will do almost anything to win it.
Prenting, good or bad, seems to have very little influence on children's behavior compared to the influence of the children's peer group.
I just re-read the latest (and imho greatest) Beowulf translation by Seamus Heaney.
I don't care for the Heaney translation myself--it's not faithful to either the letter or the spirit of the original.
Just one example of how flat the whole thing feels to me: lines 499-501, where the Danish thane Unferth challenges Beowulf. Heaney not only mis-translates it, he misrepresents the whole scene. Unferth is described as "he aet fotum saet frean Scyldinga", literally, "he (who) sat at the feet of the lord of the Scyldings." That is, Unferth was the Danes' champion and sat in the place of honor. Heaney renders this "crouched at the feet..." which is not only incorrect but gives the wrong idea of Unferth's status. Unferth rags on Beowulf about his famous contest with Breca; the poet says he "onband beadu-rune", literally, "unbound a battle-rune." Heaney says he "spoke contrary words." Way to press the life out of it. Not only is that a boring phrase, it's incorrect. Unferth is not hostile to Beowulf. He's making him feel at home, by busting his balls a little like a drinking buddy would, and giving Beowulf a chance to boast about himself. Beowulf's answer makes that clear:
Hwaet thu worn fela wine min Unferth
beore druncen ymb Brecan spraece, saegdest from his sithe. Soth ic talige..."
"Well, many things, my friend Unferth,
drunk with beer Of breca you have spoken,
talkd of his journeys. I'll tell you what happened..."
I recommend getting Howell Chickering's facing-page translation. Or, if you don't mind putting in a little effort that, believe me, will be well spent, get Klaeber's 3rd edition of the Cotton Vitellius manuscript and Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer. You'll be well rewarded.
And finally, the big one
3) People don't like change.
Why should they?
When Samuel Johnson published his Preface to the Dictionary of the English Language in 1763, he explained why he had not tried to introduce spelling reform:
"Change, says Hooker, is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better. There is in constancy and stability a general and lasting advantage, which will always overbalance the slow improvements of gradual correction."
Which is to say, life's complicated enough without making people go through a big, complicated re-design of a system most people never really understood or cared about in the first place.
The fact is, the only real impetus to make any of these reforms of standards--whether it's the calendar, or the metric system, or orthographic convention--is that the standards would make more sense. But so what? The fact that the standards don't make logical sense doesn't affect their usefulness.
The people who call for these reforms really only want the standards to satisfy their own sense of what is correct--the same way some people can't see a crooked picture on a wall without itching to straighten it. But it's not worth the massive inconvenience to nearly everyone just to satisfy your calendar-related OCD.
Well...was the whole thing really aimed at gamers?
I mean, I don't think everyone who watches the Oscars watches because they care about the movies and are curious to see who wins. They watch for the glitz--the performers, the celebrity thing. Guys watch to look at the women and women watch to see what everyone is wearing (and critique them.)
Seems to me Spike figured, People like awards shows, let's get one. What's not taken? Oh, video games.
I've never been interested in video games myself--I don't even play Solitaire--but I watched part of the show, solely because I was flipping by and I saw Snoop, and I stopped. I think Snoop is one of the funniest people alive, plus I like rap, so I'll watch pretty much anything he does (no, I don't buy Girls Gone Wild videos, I have some standards.) But I'll bet I'm the audience Spike TV had in mind.
The network, I'm sure, has no interest in games qua games, any more than CBS (or whoever it is) cares who made the best movie. The audience they want is drawn to the awards show itself, not the subject of it.
Nah, no professor is ever going to do his own research, no matter how easy it gets. They need the time for filling out grant applications and stabbing other professors in the back.
It'll be a big help to me personally! I work as a research assistant, which involves a great deal of time going through libraries and copying old journal articles (and I get paid, too, can you believe that?)
Eight or nine months ago I was looking stuff up for my professor's book on the history of the death penalty in the United States, and she had me track down an article from the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American on an outlaw named John Long, who was hanged in Mississippi in 1870. No library in New England archives the Hattiesburg American--not even Harvard or the Athenaeum--so in the end I had to call the Hattiesburg Public Library and ask the librarian to make me a photocopy of that article. (We had a hard time understanding each other--I had to spell out the name "John Long" because my Boston accent confused her. I had the same problem in South Carolina when I asked the gas station attendant what town I was in. It was Summerton, which she pronounced something like "Suhhhn't'n"--eventually she had to point to it on a map.)
Believe me, this project could save me a lot of backache and eyestrain. Looking through six months of the New York Times from 1899 on microfilm because some footnoter wasn't more specific than "late 1899" is no joke.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny thing is, the Coca-Cola Company officially insists that the name "Coca-Cola" is just a whimsical piece of alliteration and has (and NEVER had) any relation to the ingredients. This is expediency. The name came from two main ingredients--the coca leaf and the kola nut, which provided cocaine and caffeine, respectively. Both of these are still used in Coca-Cola today; the coca leaf is "decocainized", using a process I'm not familiar with. (They had to change it in the early 20th century because otherwise they would have had to label Coke as a patent medicine, and pay extra taxes. They started denying that cocaine was ever in it later, when it became bad press. If you take the tour of the plant in Atlanta, the tour guides will earnestly tell you that there was NEVER any cocaine in Coca-Cola.)
In Mark Pendergrast's excellent book, For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, he recounts an interview with a higher-up at Coca-Cola who told him that the whole strength of the company lies in the brand. I'm paraphrasing: "I could just tell you the formula, and you could make and sell Coke of your own, even telling people that you're using our formula--and no one would buy it. Because it wouldn't be Coke."
So his argument is that the strength of the product is in the name, the color scheme, and the package design; all of which are trademarked. (Unlike the formula, which is "secret.") Considering the Coca-Cola Company essentially wrote the US trademark laws, I'm not surprised they play to their strengths.
>Unless you lock your kid in the basement, he's going to be raised, whether you like it or not, by plenty of other people.
But mainly you.
There's a lot of evidence that seems to show this isn't true. Peer pressure has a hugely greater effect on children than parental pressure. This may be because parents are authority figures, and most children resent and resist authority figures; while on the other hand, most childen long for acceptance from the peer group, and will do almost anything to win it.
Prenting, good or bad, seems to have very little influence on children's behavior compared to the influence of the children's peer group.
I just re-read the latest (and imho greatest) Beowulf translation by Seamus Heaney.
I don't care for the Heaney translation myself--it's not faithful to either the letter or the spirit of the original.
Just one example of how flat the whole thing feels to me: lines 499-501, where the Danish thane Unferth challenges Beowulf. Heaney not only mis-translates it, he misrepresents the whole scene. Unferth is described as "he aet fotum saet frean Scyldinga", literally, "he (who) sat at the feet of the lord of the Scyldings." That is, Unferth was the Danes' champion and sat in the place of honor. Heaney renders this "crouched at the feet..." which is not only incorrect but gives the wrong idea of Unferth's status. Unferth rags on Beowulf about his famous contest with Breca; the poet says he "onband beadu-rune", literally, "unbound a battle-rune." Heaney says he "spoke contrary words." Way to press the life out of it. Not only is that a boring phrase, it's incorrect. Unferth is not hostile to Beowulf. He's making him feel at home, by busting his balls a little like a drinking buddy would, and giving Beowulf a chance to boast about himself. Beowulf's answer makes that clear:
Hwaet thu worn fela wine min Unferth
beore druncen ymb Brecan spraece,
saegdest from his sithe. Soth ic talige..."
"Well, many things, my friend Unferth,
drunk with beer Of breca you have spoken,
talkd of his journeys. I'll tell you what happened..."
I recommend getting Howell Chickering's facing-page translation. Or, if you don't mind putting in a little effort that, believe me, will be well spent, get Klaeber's 3rd edition of the Cotton Vitellius manuscript and Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer. You'll be well rewarded.
And finally, the big one
3) People don't like change.
Why should they?
When Samuel Johnson published his Preface to the Dictionary of the English Language in 1763, he explained why he had not tried to introduce spelling reform:
"Change, says Hooker, is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better. There is in constancy and stability a general and lasting advantage, which will always overbalance the slow improvements of gradual correction."
Which is to say, life's complicated enough without making people go through a big, complicated re-design of a system most people never really understood or cared about in the first place.
The fact is, the only real impetus to make any of these reforms of standards--whether it's the calendar, or the metric system, or orthographic convention--is that the standards would make more sense. But so what? The fact that the standards don't make logical sense doesn't affect their usefulness.
The people who call for these reforms really only want the standards to satisfy their own sense of what is correct--the same way some people can't see a crooked picture on a wall without itching to straighten it. But it's not worth the massive inconvenience to nearly everyone just to satisfy your calendar-related OCD.
Well...was the whole thing really aimed at gamers?
I mean, I don't think everyone who watches the Oscars watches because they care about the movies and are curious to see who wins. They watch for the glitz--the performers, the celebrity thing. Guys watch to look at the women and women watch to see what everyone is wearing (and critique them.)
Seems to me Spike figured, People like awards shows, let's get one. What's not taken? Oh, video games.
I've never been interested in video games myself--I don't even play Solitaire--but I watched part of the show, solely because I was flipping by and I saw Snoop, and I stopped. I think Snoop is one of the funniest people alive, plus I like rap, so I'll watch pretty much anything he does (no, I don't buy Girls Gone Wild videos, I have some standards.) But I'll bet I'm the audience Spike TV had in mind.
The network, I'm sure, has no interest in games qua games, any more than CBS (or whoever it is) cares who made the best movie. The audience they want is drawn to the awards show itself, not the subject of it.
Sounds more to me like you're out of a job
Nah, no professor is ever going to do his own research, no matter how easy it gets. They need the time for filling out grant applications and stabbing other professors in the back.
It'll be a big help to me personally!
I work as a research assistant, which involves a great deal of time going through libraries and copying old journal articles (and I get paid, too, can you believe that?)
Eight or nine months ago I was looking stuff up for my professor's book on the history of the death penalty in the United States, and she had me track down an article from the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American on an outlaw named John Long, who was hanged in Mississippi in 1870. No library in New England archives the Hattiesburg American--not even Harvard or the Athenaeum--so in the end I had to call the Hattiesburg Public Library and ask the librarian to make me a photocopy of that article.
(We had a hard time understanding each other--I had to spell out the name "John Long" because my Boston accent confused her. I had the same problem in South Carolina when I asked the gas station attendant what town I was in. It was Summerton, which she pronounced something like "Suhhhn't'n"--eventually she had to point to it on a map.)
Believe me, this project could save me a lot of backache and eyestrain. Looking through six months of the New York Times from 1899 on microfilm because some footnoter wasn't more specific than "late 1899" is no joke.