"Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent / Even against the way its waters went."

[larryhammer]

A few things I have learned this week:

1. The cross between Hanlon's razor and Clarke's third law is called Grey's law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

2. The Japanese idiom hanashi ni ohare o tsukeru (話に尾鰭を付ける) -- literally, "to attach fins and tail to a story," meaning to embellish it with exaggerations.

(Stories as fish -- I need to use that image someday.)

3. Descriptions of I Ching hexagrams can, as I have long suspected, be fertile sources of imagery for poems.


What have you discovered lately?

---L.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

1. I like it.

[larryhammer]

:-D

[sovay]

The cross between Hanlon's razor and Clarke's third law is called Grey's law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I feel I have seen formulations of this before (and it is a principle I firmly believe), but I did not know it had a name. It is in fact a topic under discussion in another window as I type, so thank you.

[larryhammer]

De nada. FWIW, I learned about it here.

---L.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Lots of random things about the tools with which hydrology research is done.

[larryhammer]

Do tell.

---L.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Flow meters and grab samplers, grab samplers and flow meters.

Also lots of poles.

[cat-i-th-adage.livejournal.com]

The Chinese name for the bubonic plague was, at the end of the 19th century shuyi - rat epidemic.

*Shrug* It's a fact I learned recently, okay?

[larryhammer]

That's interesting, actually. I wonder if it still is. And when it became the term.

---L.

[cat-i-th-adage.livejournal.com]

Here's my source: Shuyi 鼠疫 ("plague"; literally "rat epidemic") is a modern word that appeared only after the main vector of the plague had been identified in the very late 19th century, probably on the occasion of the third pandemic (the plague is actually carried and transmitted by the fleas that live on rats, but this detail didn't make it into the Chinese word for that disease). Not a single book titled Shuyi something appeared before 1911 (during imperial times), though plenty of them were published during the Republican period, when the disease was still pandemic or at least fresh in everybody's memory.

From Shangshu Lang 尚书, posting on the China History Forum - http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/29948-the-black-death-in-china/

I haven't yet found out what they called it before that.

[larryhammer]

Coo. Thanks.

---L.