May Contain Nuts

Today's word is: Glurge

Glurge refers to sacharrine anacdotes whose 'uplifing' message is undermined by their own subtext.

You know the kind of thing - stories whose ostensive message is "Friends are more important than money" and "Honour above acolade" but which really say "Stop whinging about your poverty" and "Obey the rules".

There's the one about Robert the Bruce and the Spider, lots of stuff about how prayer and hope overcome impossible odds, and generally something about a disabled athlete who suceeds through sheer determination.

In primary school, I remember the whole class being made to memorise "If at first you don't succeed, try try try again" and to repeat it mantralike, with the assurance that it was an important, life changing truth.

The headmaster often addressed the school during morning assemblies, telling stories about how two monks averted a war between Argentina and Chile by pleading with the generals, or how plants (and therefore people) have to suffer to become strong.

It never occured to me to argue against this wash of gibberish. I could see through it, and assumed everyone else could too. It was just vaguely puzzling that adults kept producing it, so I just sat and ignored it.

The school, noticing this, paid for me to have a battery of tests to find out if I was deaf or subnormal. Good hearing, IQ of 130+. Which was nice.

I also have vague recollections of sessions with a psychologist, trying to find out why I was 'withdrawn'. He concluded I wasn't withdrawn - I was "bright but shy", which is probably accurate.

So much for childhood. Good word though.
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Written on my packet of chocolate biscuits: "Warning: Insert May Form Small Parts".

Once someone tells me what that means, I shall be duly warned.
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ScienceBlogs is a new home for...scientific blogs. Not much there yet, but it looks like it could become a very good 'one stop shop' for science writing that is comprehensible to the layman (e.g. me) without being pitched at complete novices.

It's that field between beginner and advanced again. Esperantists have a phrase, "Eterna Komenculo" - Eternal Beginner, one who is completely competent in the basics, but doesn't have the resources, time or energy to go further.
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I'm attempting to revise maths, especially algebra. Most of which I haven't done since I was 10 years old.

Indicies, Standard form, number bases, modulo, types of average - No problem. Lemon squeezy.

Simultainious equations - I used to know how to solve them. That is, I spent a week doing them in 1983, but never outside of a classroom, and never since.

Difference of two squares - I used to know what it meant.

Mantissa - Give me a minute, and I'll remember. Make it five minutes.

Binomials - Found out what it meant last night.

Antilogarithms, quadratic functions, codomains, volume of a sphere, tangent curve - Um.