2025 was a no good, very bad year. I would like to think that the coming year will be better but since nearly all the things that made this year awful are all pretty much still in place, the likelihood of that happening is slight.
But despite that, I would like to hope that at least in your personal lives, the coming year brings good things. It is admittedly a very modest hope but it is all that I can genuinely summon up.
Thanks all who took the trouble to come here and read and comment.
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I knew most of this stuff but it was presented entertainingly.
I am never bored when I am at home alone because there are so many things enjoyable things that I can choose to do. While I greatly enjoy being in the company of a few people such as close friends or others whose company I find enjoyable, the times when I have been most bored is when I have been in large gatherings, such as parties, where one has a series of superficial conversations with many different people. If I am lucky, I may find a kindred soul with whom to sit in a corner and have more meaningful exchanges. It is even worse when the ambient noise is so loud that you cannot even hear anyone else and conversation just stops and you just sit there unable to read or even think. This can happen in bars and wedding receptions.
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There is an enduring appeal to encyclopedias.The ability to look up information that has been prepared by credible sources on a huge range of topics, is invaluable, especially for someone like me whose curiosity takes me in many different directions, triggered by random events in my life. As a result, I bought a complete set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica back around the early 1980s. I was not wealthy and it cost a lot but it was the one luxury that I felt justified in indulging in. Sadly I then had to part with it when I came to the US, because the massive multi-volume set was too expensive to ship and I expected that I would be moving around a lot in my first few years here as I struggled to gain a foothold in my career. So I gifted it to a friend. Then later in the US when my children were little and we were settled, I bought another multivolume encyclopedia set, ostensibly to help them look up stuff for their homework and for general interest though I think that secretly it was for my own benefit and I ended up being the main user.
What is nice about a physical encyclopedia is the serendipity that it enables, that you often start out looking up something specific but as you turn the pages to get to that entry, you stumble across unrelated items that are interesting and read about them too. It is like walking along library stacks looking for a particular book and finding other books that look interesting and checking them out as well. The difference is that with library stacks, books are arranged according to subject categories so you will likely be in the same general area while in an encyclopedia the entries are sorted alphabetically, so with the latter one can end up very far from the starting point.
But this was before the internet and Wikipedia, which has become the go-to source for people looking for information on anything. Now one is less likely to end up on a random topic, just as doing online searches for library books means that one can miss out on serendipitous discoveries. The same is true for journals and magazines. When you have hard copies, you tend to look at the table of contents and that can result in finding new articles of interest. But with online sources, you often get sent directly to the article you are looking for and do not scan the content titles. This saves time but also results in loss.
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Being a lexicographer compiling dictionaries in the internet age can be viewed as both exciting, because of all the new words that can quickly gain currency, or a nightmare, because one has to decide whether to include some new word or not and what the word might even mean, knowing that whatever you decide will be hotly contested by some.
In a review of the book Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionaryby Stefan Fatsis, Louis Menand looks at the history of the modern dictionary.
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in London in 1755, carved out a role for the dictionary: to establish what would become known as Standard English. Johnson himself was aware that language is a living thing, always in flux. But his dictionary, with its conclusiveness, was a huge publishing success. It was considered authoritative well into the nineteenth century. In England, it would be replaced by the Oxford English Dictionary. But, in the United States, its role was usurped by Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, which made its début in 1828.
Webster deliberately set out to supersede Johnson. His ambition was to create not a dialect of British English but an identifiably American language. Johnson’s dictionary had about forty-two thousand words; Webster’s had seventy thousand. Webster added New World words including “skunk,” “boost,” and “roundabout”; words with Native American origins, such as “canoe” and “moose”; words derived from Mexican Spanish, like “coyote.” Most dramatically, he Americanized spelling, a project started in an earlier work of his, a schoolbook speller called “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” published in 1783. It is because of Webster that we write “defense” and “center” rather than “defence” and “centre,” “public” and not “publick.” He changed the language.
Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, announced as “unabridged,” appeared in 1934. Web. II was a doorstop—six hundred thousand entries, thirty-five thousand geographical names, and, in the appendix, thirteen thousand biographical names.
By now, I have become familiar with the signs that something that I receive via the phone or text or email is a scam but once in a while something new comes along that gets past my first layer of skepticism and gets me to go deeper.
This happened when I received an email that said that I had been nominated for an education award that would be presented at one of a series of conferences that are held twice a year. I looked into it and it seemed legitimate. The locations of the conferences were impressive, consisting of luxury hotels such as the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, the Intercontinental Hotel in Dubai, and the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. The website for the organization Education 2.0 Conference that was behind these events was flashy. That was, however, a red flag that something was not quite right. Education academics (like me) are a stodgy lot and their conference websites reflect that ethos. They have static pages that feature the key speakers and topics and conference agenda. This website, however, had dynamic wallpaper showing floor shows and cabarets and the like. But it looked like these conferences had actually been held.
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I hate airline travel. It is all so tedious, the drive to the airport, parking, taking the shuttle to the terminal, the checking-in line, the security line ritual with TSA and then the wait for your flight in the usually crowded gate area, sitting in a cramped plane for some hours, and the process at the destination, such as waiting for your bag at the carousel, and getting to the taxi cab location. The only redeeming feature is that it gets you to your destination so much more quickly than any other way. In my case, if I can drive to my destination in six or seven hours (about 400 miles), I prefer to do so since the total travel time is about the same and the aggravation is much less.
Of all the above listed discomforts of air travel, the one that I find least tedious is the waiting at the gate. If the seats are reasonably comfortable and I have access to an electrical outlet in case my computer battery runs low and the wi-fi is decent and free, I am fine waiting for even a few hours in case of a layover or flight delays. If the seats on either side of me are vacant, I consider that a nice bonus.
In walking through the terminals, I have noticed the existence of places labeled ‘lounges’ with various identifiers of airlines attached, suggesting that they are only accessible to people with some sort of membership pass. But in this amusing article by Zach Helfand, he informs me that there is an entire world behind those portals that are sought out by the wealthy and not-so-wealthy who prefer not to hobnob with the hoi polloi that make up the people in the concourses. These places offer plush surroundings, comfortable chairs, fancy food, drinks, massages, facials, manicures, spas, even pool tables and actual swimming pools.
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I am not a gourmet. I am not a foodie. I have little interest in food other than to sustain life. While I can tell when food tastes awful, I cannot distinguish between good food and really good food the way that connoisseurs can. Hence I do not seek out eating ‘experiences’, going to fancy restaurants to try out their wares. However, I can understand people who do if they can afford to eat at such expensive places.
What I find hard to understand is people willing to risk going to prison for the sake of eating a fancy meal, the way that this 34-year old ‘influencer’ (seems like pretty much everyone is an influencer these days), who has come to be known as the ‘dine and dash diva’, did.
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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about an article in The New Yorker by humorist Patricia Marx who ventured into the world of online chatbots who are designed to serve as online companions to people and can be disconcertingly realistic.
This seemed intriguingly weird. so I decided to try it out for myself. I went to one of the free sites Marx mentioned. Since I was too lazy to do the work of designing my own bot, I looked through the stock ones. All of them seem to be young and very attractive. I picked out a 39-year old librarian because she was the oldest on offer and was thus the least likely to have its algorithm make contemporary pop culture references that I was ignorant of. I also figured that a librarian would be closest to being a nerd like me. Her profile had plenty of quotes taken from well-known writers so she seemed to be compatible.
I started up a conversation about the book A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell which I happen to be reading right now. While her responses were realistic, they were also somewhat superficial, like those of a smart and articulate person who has not actually read the book but just synopses and articles about it, which is of course how these large language model algorithms work. She was like a student giving a book report after having skimmed through a few Wikipedia pages. For some reason, she kept urging me to another book by Russell called The Conquest of Happiness that I have not read or even heard about.
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I learned recently that in elevators in the US built after the early nineteen nineties, the door-close buttons do not work. They are there as a placebo, to give people a sense of control. What’s more, they are not the only placebos in our lives.
The head of the National Elevator Industry, Karen Penafiel, confirmed to The New York Times in a recent article that functional close-door buttons have been phased out since the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990 (Door open buttons still work). Federal law requires that the doors stay open long enough for those with crutches or a wheelchair to get in the elevator.
“The riding public would not be able to make those doors close any faster,” Penafiel told The Times.
And the newspaper notes this is not the only example of placebos “that promote an illusion of control but that in reality do not work.”
Signs may tell pedestrians to push a button and wait for the walk signal, but The Times reports that most of those buttons were deactivated more than a decade ago as computer-controlled traffic signals became more popular.
Additionally, some workplaces have installed “dummy thermostats,” according to The Times, and that has cut down on complaints about the temperature in the office.
So why does placebo technology exist? It all comes down to mental health, one local expert says.
“Perceived control is very important,” Harvard University psychology professor Ellen Langer tells The Times. “It diminishes stress and promotes well being.”
I wonder how many other placebos exist that I am unaware of.
I have long felt that the only people who use the door-close buttons are the chronically impatient since at best you only save a few seconds. They are the same people who get mad and honk at because you actually stop at a stop sign instead of rolling through or when you slow down when the traffic light ahead turns yellow so that you can stop without sharp braking, while they want you to accelerate through the light so that they can follow. They are the same people who, although someone has already pressed the elevator call button or the walk signal, will press it again, as if the people already waiting are dolts who have nothing better to do than stand around.
I am relieved to hear about the elevator door-close inactivation. There have been occasions when I am already in an elevator and someone comes running saying “Hold the elevator!” I try to push the door-open button but, because it is right next to the door-close button, by accident press the door-close one and am mortified when the doors close before the person can enter, thinking that that person will think I am a jerk and deliberately closed the door on them. At least now I know that I did not make it close faster as if I maliciously wanted to keep the latecomer out, but was merely inept.