X Times More

Posted on 2016-06-08 by arjaybe

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Grammar of the Day – X Times More

Here’s another one that bothers me: people saying X times more when they mean X times as many/much. For instance, if I have ten cherries (Mmm. Cherries) and they have thirty cherries, they’ll say, “I have three times more than you.” No. They have two times more. If they had three times more then they’d have forty cherries. That would be ten plus three times more equals forty.

I understand the logic of the error. Thirty is more than ten and thirty is three times ten, therefore thirty is three times more than ten. It’s an easy mistake to make. But let’s change the numbers and see what happens. Let’s say I have ten cherries and they have fifteen. Do they have one and a half times more? What if I have ten and they have ten. Do they have one time more? How about if I have ten and they have five? Does that mean they have one half more? By their logic less would equal more. The language leads to confusion.

They have an out, though. They just change the language at equality. At ten they say “same as,” and below ten they say “less than.” But they have to do some mental gymnastics to do it. They might say that five is one half less than ten, but then why wouldn’t they say that fifteen is one half more? Or they might say that five is one half as much, but then why wouldn’t they say that fifteen is one and a half times as much?

The inconsistency and the potential for confusion bother me, but I don’t see much hope for a return to good language. It’s too ingrained by now. You see it everywhere. I’ll just have to adapt to stay out of trouble. When my bicycle tire is at twenty PSI and they say I need two times more, I’ll have to remember to pump it up to forty PSI and not sixty.

rjb

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Elgin’s Synesthesia

Posted on 2016-06-01 by arjaybe

Credit Filipe-Simões

Synesthesia of the Day – Elgin’s Synesthesia

Elgin, like the other inhabitants of Green Comet, is a synesthete. I refer to that fact a few times during the novel, and in the sequel, Parasite Puppeteers. I don’t go into a lot of detail about the types of synesthesia the individual characters have, although I do imply that they each have at least two types. Given the rudimentary stage synesthesia research is at now, and even more so when I was writing it, I didn’t think it was wise to nail it down too precisely in the story. And given that the characters have multiple strong synesthesias, I doubt that the interactions and synergies among them would lend themselves to the tentative, simplistic classifications we’re developing now. However, given all that, I think I should offer my idea, the thing I’m thinking of when I imagine Elgin’s synesthetic perceptions.

Elgin’s most obvious synesthetic trait is the way he feels in his body when he sees an example of good engineering or construction. For instance, when Minder takes him out and he sees the new corridors and how well they’re made, he has the sensation of all his bones being properly aligned in his body. A very comforting sense of rightness. I haven’t found one type of synesthesia that fits this perfectly, but it is somewhere in the vision to touch, proprioception and kinetics area. He feels what he sees on many levels: simple touch, deeper orientation and subtle movement.

This goes beyond a simple integration of physical sensations. When he looks at an engineering paper and immediately knows if it’s right, the role of vision is taken by concepts and ideas. Inner visions. But the principle is the same. What he “sees” is experienced as “feeling.” The same applies to more general situations. As long as he has enough data, enough information, he can tell if something is right. Not in any moralistic sense of right or wrong, just whether it’s right. For instance, when Frances and Buzzard explain to him how Green Comet is in danger from the Visitor, he instantly knows that they’re right, because it feels right.

So, for lack of anything better, let’s call Elgin’s synesthesia Seeing-Feeling Synesthesia. This web page doesn’t address it perfectly, but it provides some good food for thought. And here’s a pretty good site for exploring the types of synesthesia.

rjb

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Microsculpture – The Insect Portraits of Levon Biss

Posted on 2016-05-22 by arjaybe

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Levon Biss is a successful commercial photographer. His work has been used in advertising, on magazines and in a book about soccer. Now he has an exhibition of his images of insects, showing the Oxford University Museum of Natural History’s insect collection in stunning detail. The exhibition runs from May 27 to October 30, 2016, and it’s called Microsculpture. The prints range in size up to three meters, each an image of a tiny insect captured down to the finest detail.

These are not just snapshots of pretty bugs. Each image takes about three weeks to complete. He shoots each insect in sections — about thirty on average — and then compiles the shots into a single, complete image. In all, he shoots 8,000 to 10,000 photographs of each bug, then combines the best parts of them into the final product. He needs to get the lighting and the focus just right for each tiny part, so the whole image can be perfectly lighted and focused. Since the depth of field is so small with a microscopic lens, he can only move the camera ten microns between shots. That’s not much more than a tenth of the width of a human hair.

If you want to see the detailed originals of these small samples, follow the links to Levon Biss’s Microsculpture website. There you can see the light reflecting off the individual cells of compound eyes, and count the hairs on little buggy legs. There’s also a video that shows how he did it.

All photos copyright Levon Biss.

rjb

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