Bad blogger

In case you won­der why I haven’t been blog­ging late­ly, some­thing else came up.

Miles of smiles

In case you’ve been won­der­ing, “Where’ve you been for the last month, Josh?,” the pho­to above gives a pret­ty good hint.
Miles Niko­la was born on May 4th, a healthy and beau­ti­ful 8 pounds 12 ounces. For the last month, he and his mama and I have been at home get­ting used to each oth­er. It’s tru­ly uncan­ny how dif­fer­ent he is from day to day. His cheeks seem to grow expo­nen­tial­ly, for instance.

Also, he just fig­ured out that he can bend any­one to his will through sus­tained eye con­tact and cute­ness, a dan­ger­ous prece­dent indeed. Once he ful­ly mas­ters the smile, I think we’re doomed.

I don’t recall whether I intro­duced you all to Roo, the dog we adopt­ed last fall, but Miles and Roo have been get­ting along nice­ly, as you can see. Nei­ther has quite fig­ured out how to inter­act with the oth­er, but there’s no notice­able jeal­ousy, and I’m expect­ing adorable antics from the pair as soon as Miles gets a bit more mobile.

And yes, fol­low­ing Chad’s exam­ple, I’m tak­ing peri­od­ic pho­tos next to a stuffed ani­mal, for scale. And he inher­it­ed is papa’s love of zool­o­gy and books:

I expect it’ll be a while before any­one else gets much sleep, but he, thank­ful­ly, has no prob­lem catch­ing a nap.

There are many adven­tures yet to come.

Pascal’s lament and E. B. White

Long ago (1656), Blaise Pas­cal wrote an apolo­getic note that edi­tors have been quot­ing at pro­lix writ­ers ever since:

The present let­ter is a very long one, sim­ply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Brevi­ty is a key to effec­tive writ­ing, if noth­ing else because it’s hard to hold a read­er’s atten­tion, but also for styl­is­tic rea­sons. Short sen­tences lend emphasis. 

Alas, it’s slow and painful.

Three hun­dred years after Pas­cal, Strunk and White’s Ele­ments of Style again empha­sized the insis­tence on remov­ing need­less words wher­ev­er pos­si­ble, one of sev­er­al Strunk and White choic­es ques­tioned by oth­er style guides. Appar­ent­ly, though, even White had to stand up for the occa­sion­al extra word. Maria Popo­va quotes this let­ter from White to a read­er who missed the point:

Dear Mr. â€“

It comes down to the mean­ing of ‘needless.’ Often a word can be removed with­out destroy­ing the struc­ture of a sen­tence, but that does not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that the word is need­less or that the sen­tence has gained by its removal.

If you were to put a nar­row con­struc­tion on the word ‘needless,’ you would have to remove tens of thou­sands of words from Shake­speare, who sel­dom said any­thing in six words that could be said in twen­ty. Writ­ing is not an exer­cise in exci­sion, it’s a jour­ney into sound. How about ‘tomorrow and tomor­row and tomor­row’*? One tomor­row would suf­fice, but it’s the oth­er two that have made the thing immortal.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your letter.

Yrs,

E. B. White

(That aster­isk seems to be Popo­va’s who seems to fear that the read­er may not catch the ref­er­ence to Mac­beth. What an age we live in!)

A help­ful pas­sage to bear in mind next time an edi­tor takes too dull a blade to your writing.

A year ago today

Good times, then and now.

Ugh

Hav­ing a cold isn’t as much fun as you’d think. Back to reg­u­lar blog­ging shortly.

If you haven’t reg­is­tered for Skep­ti­Cal ’11 yet, there’s still time before Sunday.

I endorse this open letter

Janet Stemwedel has an open let­ter, and as some­one who got the same ham-fist­ed pro­mo­tions, and did­n’t write about it for rough­ly the same rea­son (also I don’t care about sil­ly put­ty), I can endorse her let­ter wholeheartedly.

Candy from strangers

Thanks to Boing­Bo­ing for this exam­ple of the impor­tance of skep­ti­cism:

A gang of thieves in Istan­bul, Turkey have report­ed­ly been dress­ing like doc­tors and dis­trib­ut­ing seda­tives door to door, telling res­i­dents the med­i­cine was relat­ed to a test for high blood pres­sure. Once the vic­tims dosed, the thieves would rob them. As part of the police inves­ti­ga­tion, offi­cers attempt­ed the same trick but used place­bos. Appar­ent­ly 86 out of 100 peo­ple who answered the door took the pill right away. Police then attempt­ed to explain why that was a bad idea. From Reuters:

Turk­ish police in oth­er provinces have also used nov­el meth­ods to test cit­i­zens’ gullibility.

Offi­cers in Adana in south­ern Turkey last week called at hous­es, announc­ing through the inter­com: “I am a bur­glar, please open the door.” Police said they were stunned at the num­ber of peo­ple who opened the door, the Radikal dai­ly news­pa­per reported.

Empha­sis added.

Maybe this explains why peo­ple swal­low the wild tales of birthers.

Want

This is the awe­somest thing EVAR!

Twitter

If you aren’t fol­low­ing me on twit­ter, you real­ly should. Like a lot of blog­gers, I’ve tak­en to using twit­ter as a repos­i­to­ry for minor com­men­tary and indi­vid­ual links that aren’t quite deserv­ing of their own blog post, but that still amuse me. So if you aren’t read­ing the twit­ter feed, you aren’t get­ting the full TfK experience.

So keep track of me at @JoshRosenau.