random bits

[cellio]

Overheard from a Diablo game: "...as long as you resurrect faster than they heal..." Um, yeah. :-)

I didn't know about the Netflix prize until siderea posted about it. Nifty! Improve their predictions by 10%; win a million bucks. It'll be interesting if the psychologist ends up beating the mathematicians.

I recently attended a religious service that had a lot of poetry in it. Or, at least, I assume it was poetry, but it made me wonder: surely modern (meterless, structureless) poetry is more than just doing things with white space, right? I mean, I understand a sonnet or a sestina at some level; I see the challenges that faced the author and can appreciate the artistry worked within those constraints. I have, thus far, been unable to develop such an appreciation for the choice of where to put a line break, except in the small subset of cases where that creates a change in meaning or creates an accrostic or some such. It feels, to me, sort of like composing music without concerning oneself with key, mode, or time signature. Obviously I'm missing something.

I was asked a few days ago to read a short torah portion this Shabbat. I wondered how long it would take me to learn (it's about 12 lines in the scroll). Answer, for first-order learning: 35 minutes. That was surprising. Of course, it will require daily reinforcement to keep it, but that's fine.

Note to self: I was talking with someone recently about what I look for in candiates for the laurel (the SCA's highest award for arts and sciences), and remembered that I had written about this a while back. Yup, still believe all that, almost six years later.

Comments

[cellio]

Each line carries roughly equal weight: a long line is a flurry of ideas, while a single word lingers.

Thanks; I hadn't thought to look at it that way!