Blessed by the Potato

I’m not talking about dates as in the stuff that happens before the awkward 5 minute silence as you clumsily try to say goodnight on the doorstep, I’m talking about the day of the month, in numeric form. Many people prefer a date format that looks like DD-MM-YY (or YYYY) since it’s a nice progression from short time periods to longer ones. Still others prefer YYYY-MM-DD for the same reasons, and also because it sorts nicely on a computer (plus if you see a date format that has 4 numbers at the front, it’s very hard to get confused about which standard you’re using). Other people (apparently Americans/Canadians for the most part) prefer a MM-DD standard; I know for a long time that was the standard I used.

This standard, some say, is peculiar. Now, I must admit that it does cause confusion, and there have been a number of rough Aprils spent looking at expiry dates on food and trying to figure out whether it was March 5th or May 3rd… but I don’t think the format is so confusing. It meshes well with the way we format our time (HH:MM), that is from larger to smaller divisions. And since the month is usually the most important thing to look for when going through a set of papers, it makes sense to put it first (typically you can remember the month you did something in but not the exact date, and papers from different years will likely be in different folders). It also follows the way we tend to say the dates: March fifth versus the fifth of March or five March (though those last two forms, particularly the middle one, do appear with some regularity).

Of course, in saying that I find that I’m at a complete loss to explain why ten dollars gets the dollar sign put in front ($10).

Do you ever find yourself caught… trapped somehow in that hazy time period between 2 and 4 am, uselessly pondering things that not only can you not change: but that also don’t matter in the slightest? Yeah, me neither… though I have started to wonder if I had a small stroke or something, because my typing has gone hugely downhill all of a sudden this last week. I thought that maybe something got into my keyboard at work, but tonight I’ve found the same problem at home: tonnes of typos (far above and beyond what is normal for me), particularly with the way my two hands sync together, and the way my thumb syncs with the rest of my typing: my spaces are often coming a character or two too soon or too late. Or maybe I’m just over tired and my hands are clumsy.

My point, and I shall make it shortly so that you can finish this post and go back to not sleeping, is that “The Peculiar Date Standards of Americans” WMAGNFARB.

Oh, and I really need to get a good short story finished in the next few weeks, and I haven’t even had any half decent ideas to write on sticky notes and lose in the last little while…

Via DJ Paradise, comes this article about serving sizes.

Yep, people have trouble determining what a serving size is sometimes. I think it was a really poor choice of words — “serving” — it makes you think of a serving platter at a restaurant or something. Most people automatically make serving = meal in their minds, but really servings are quite small (a total of 20-24 or so servings a day over your ~3 meals + snacks). 2 cookies, a kid’s sippy glass of milk, half a bowl of soup: portions that are much smaller than we tend to have experience with. Unfortunately in this case it’s not the companies, but the government that’s to blame for not only creating the discrepancy between portion size and serving size, but also for giving it the name “serving”. [Though whether we should blame the American or Canadian government is a bit of an open question; if in doubt, blame both]

Also, I highly recommend you all go to YouTube and search for “How it should have ended” — they’re a funny series of clips.

I think that my cat is making me stupid. I just simply spend too much time alone with the creature, speaking in monosyllables or baby-talk.

Plus she’s just such a pretty kitty that I want to roll over and take a nap, or maybe purr a little.

By now if you own a radio you’ve doubtlessly heard the song that basically wails “does that make me crazy?” On endless repeat like that, I find it gets really annoying. However today I noticed that the song tends to play in the morning when my alarm goes off, and its undue popularity is handy, because when you’re half asleep playing snooze button basketball, asking yourself “does that make me crazy?” is a good question…

Well, it turns out my inexperienced, volunteer-based course offering isn’t an isolated incident at Western: grad studies just doesn’t seem to care about classes anymore. Halfway into September, after the add/drop date, the faculty decided out of nowhere that it wasn’t going to let grad students take undergrad courses (even if they need them to round out their background for their research). Some of our students found out by showing up to class, and having the profs tell them that they weren’t on the class list. The department had no idea that this was even under consideration, and it makes very little sense. True, grad student tuition is a bit lower than undergrad tuition on a per term basis (~$2k vs $3k), but we pay every term, so it evens out, and for the most part we don’t take any classes, so the few people who do need them should be able to take them on that sort of subsidy of the majority.

It is also true that nigh unlimited undergrad course enrolment was being abused by a few people: some have used their time doing a research degree to brush up on their chem or bio before taking a run at med school. In one notorious case, a PhD student got a bachelors of art at the same time, paying only grad tuition (which was covered by her research stipend). But these are pretty rare, and to not even let grads take one undergrad course (and to kick those who were already taking one out halfway into September) is overkill…