Thursday 30 May 2002

categories: Regrets; Things that are Gone

Man, it must suck to be in a long-distance relationship. Joe has been going back and forth to Florida, where his partner has been moved by his company, for the last month. I sympathized. It’s in Orlando. He recommended a number of good wines that might have gone well with the salmon I had in Toronto. I was thinking a red would have been better matched to the strength of a salmon than that sauvignon blanc, but he recommended a number of whites that would have done well. For next time, I will try a Gavi a Gavi region principessa (Italian). He also mentioned some other possibilities: pinot gris, or pinot grigiot; a burgundy, or a bourgogne. He had some specific wines in mind, but thought they would be hard to find. Because I seem to eat salmon filets on every client site, I thought knowing this would serve me in good stead. It’s nice to have an oenophilist in-office if you’re trying to learn about the stuff. 11:54:19 PM    comment []

categories: Computationally Minded

Music Industry Unveils New Piracy-Proof Format: A Black, Plastic Disc With Grooves On It Cute, but not necessarily true. I have several late eighties/early nineties 7” punk ’n’ power-pop slabs that I ripped. It would be harder with the new TiBook—which is one reason I picked up the USB audio in—but since the Lombard is free nowadays, it’s connected semi-permanently to the stereo and S-Video link for pulling video feeds. [by way of DotBlog (Richard Giles) who had it from David Gagne] Speaking of audio formats: Celine Dion killed my iMac! [by way of Slashdot: Apple] 11:29:40 PM    comment []

Laughter? It’s a funny business Robert Provine, a leading researcher on laughter, has this to say about it: His most surprising conclusion is that most laughter has little to do with humour. After studying 1,200 examples of natural laughter in the real world, he found fewer than 20 per cent were linked to humour. Most laughter follows apparently banal or humourless statements. It occurs during playful behaviour and social bonding. “Laughter is social, being 30 times less frequent in solitary than social situations. We laugh when alone even less than we smile when alone,” says Prof Provine, the author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. “Humour should be a footnote in the story about laughter, not vice versa.” [The Telegraph by way of Arts & Letters Daily] What was I saying earlier? So if laughter is not necessarily due to humor, then her laughter was not out of the norm. Does this mean that I’m not as attractive to women as I think I am? Jason Rutter has this to say about how laughter is evoked: The rhetorical tricks used by comedians are close to those used by politicians—such as trotting out lists of threes and setting up opposites. “Certainly jokes are important, but in a stand-up comedy routine, it’s hard to say that the jokes are causing the laughter,” says Dr Rutter. “As Frank Carson said, it is indeed the way that you tell them rather than the jokes themselves that are the most important. We recognise the rhetoric of comedy as tools for showing us where the opportunities to laugh are. “Laughter does not just happen or erupt out of a response to a joke stimulus. It is negotiated.” So in what way did we “negotiate” her particularly lyrical laughter? If, say, I wanted to make it happen again? Let’s say that the situation was tense, as I had not eaten and I was making an effort in order not to appear crass (though we know the truth, eh?). From Rutter’s remarks it would seem that she responding to some intention of mine that she laugh? Was she rewarding the effort I was making? Or indicating that I should not be making it? One can only hope. 11:04:43 PM    comment []