S.KRAUSE

Dirty Diatribes

Part 4

It’s that time of year again: It’s time to write my term papers. Getting down to work, however, involves a lot more than simply doing the required work. In my case, it requires procrastination. For me, that means doing lots of little things that, while useful, don’t directly benefit the work I’m supposed to be doing. So, for example, I’ll do laundry or clean my apartment. I’ll organize music and/or books, and I’ll sort my email. All worthy tasks, mind you ... just not what is required to get my papers written. Having said all this, I thought I might clean out a few text files I have around here on the computer. The following line is from a Slashdot post a few weeks ago:

I just copied it down because I found it humorous. That’s exactly the type of humor I enjoy. Or, more exactly, one of the types of humor I enjoy. It also reminds me of the difficulties in marketing “I can’t believe it’s not butter” in Europe due to certain EU “truth in advertising” regulations. Another line, also—I believe—from Slashdot a while back, is:

As a German teacher/student—that is, as someone who has experience both learning the ins-and-outs of German and in attempting to teach these things to others—I also find this amusing. I am tempted to print it out for my students. One other thing that I am reminded of is/was the creation of the term “sitt” to parallel “satt” in German. Strange, yes, but true. I haven’t taught my students “sitt” yet, though.

Now for something completely stupid. One day I simply wrote out a random number. Bored, I decided to factor it. “It” is listed below.

• 1046185
• 1046185/5=209237
• 209237/7=29891
• 29891/71=421
• 421 is prime

While I’m cleaning things out, I thought I’d post a few links that I had stored away, for some reason, in another text file. I must admit it—I’m a packrat, and I’ve collected hundreds, if not thousands of links to other pages on the web. Every so often I go through my bookmarks and organize things. As a result, I have a whole set of pages of organized links. I have another set of pages consisting of other peoples’ bookmarks. How lame, right?

• Arie Kuipers’s Bookmarks
• Bookmarks of Len Mitchell (ab380)
• jwz’s bookmarks
• Worst of the Web
• Internet Homepages Top 100

As is obvious, I find rather random things on the web. Over a year ago I came across a quote I found interesting. It is interesting because it shows the strong belief of the author in the ’objectivity’ of science—specifically that science is beyond ideology, whereas the ‘humanities’ (or, culture in general) are mere tools of nationalism and ideology. It’s a quote that could have come from the 1950s. Below is the quote:

I had also saved—in a text file—and old email to Andrew. 8/13/98 the date says. That day I was simply browsing around, checking out random domain names to see what is/was out there. Obviously, the status of some of the things I’ve found has changed by now.

Well, I suppose that about takes care of it for now. I cleaned out a few old files. I still have some ICQ chat and message logs to archive, but other than that, I’ve completed quite a bit (with regard to organizing my documents).

—December 11, 1999

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