Monthly Archives: May 2008

E-Prime Lite

Thinking about E-Prime ( introduced here ) has given me a new perspective on the word “is”. I’m in the process of putting together a manuscript with a co-author, and the various catch-alls committed by the use of “is” are jumping out at me.

The fact is, writing in E-Prime would be extremely awkward as compared with the status quo. Not only that, my advisor would probably fire me if I attempted it. What can be done when writing a paper is to take a hard look at every use of “is”, and determine whether each one can be replaced by a better verb. For example, “This figure is a set of images from …” can be replaced with, “This figure contains a set of images from …”.

Also, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I commit a few punctuation atrocities intentionally, and I don’t intend to change them. Foremost is my placement of final sentence punctuation outside of quotes. As a programmer, it just drives me crazy to place punctuation inside of a quote, where it doesn’t belong, simply because the rules say so. I have read that my placement is more accepted in British English writing, which is I guess some consolation. Here’s an example of breakage and how my use circumvents it:

Tom leaned forward, a glint in his eyes, and said, “You don’t really mean to imply that we should eat babies, do you?”

Tom’s sentence ends with a question mark, but the sentence overall is a statement! (Perhaps there’s already some convention about this that I’m unaware of. I really should read Strunk and White one of these days.) I would therefore write:

Tom leaned forward, a glint in his eyes, and said, “You don’t really mean to imply that we should eat babies, do you?”.

Now you know my dirty little secret, and it’s out in the open. Lest you be tempted to correct me.

Which, That, Classes, and Instances

Yesterday at the climbing wall I overheard a discussion on grammar, and one of the people mentioned that he couldn’t remember the difference between “which” and “that”.

This is one of those things that I know how to write property, but I can’t explain why.

Or couldn’t — for now I can. While waiting for the hopkins med campus shuttle today, I sat and wrote some sample “which” and “that” sentences and tried to discern what differentiates them. Here are the examples that I wrote. (Or, here are the examples, which I wrote.)

“This is the house that Jack built.”

“This is aspirin, which is used for headaches.”

“This is the aspirin that I took for my headache.”

The last sentence is when the answer snapped into focus for me: the difference was analogous to the difference between classes and their instantiations in object-oriented programming. “This is aspirin” describes the aspirin class — any and all aspirin. “Which is used for headaches” specifies more detail about the aspirin. On the other hand, “That I took for my headache” specifies a particular instance of the class “aspirin”, namely, the specific aspirin that I took for my headache. I wrote this note next:

“Look up whether ‘classes’ and ‘instances’ have analogous counterparts in language — they must.”

Sure enough, upon looking up the question, I found that I was almost exactly right. If you are uncertain about the proper usages of “that” and “which”, I suggest you read about the issue here.

Oh How I Love Coffee

Coffee, or Caffeine in general… ah… we’ve had a tumultuous relationship. I remember my first real taste of coffee — blended with hot cocoa on a cold Boy Scout camp-out during a Michigan winter. Then there were the several times I mistakenly thought Mountain Dew would make a good breakfast in high school. (That’s a negative, by the way. It invariably resulted in a stomach ache.)

In college, especially freshman and sophomore years, I tested the limits of both sleep deprivation and coffee consumption. It was possible to get a 20 oz cup of coffee at the cafeteria for something like $1.25, and one refill was free on the same day with the original receipt. There were days when I had 40 or 60 oz of cheap, cafeteria coffee with chicory. Something magic happened when I had consumed that much caffeine — I wrote code for my computer science classes that worked flawlessly, yet it took me hours to comprehend what I had written the next day. The mechanism underlying this increased ability seemed to be a greater “stack depth”, meaning that I could keep more things in short-term memory simultaneously. This allowed me to reliably track a greater number of programming constructs at once, requiring less checking-back of variable names and so forth.

I quit that level of consumption, cold turkey. I wasn’t doing it all of the time, and fortunately my withdrawal symptoms were limited to minor headaches and tiredness. After quitting I felt much better. The body can only take that kind of abuse for so long. I eventually went back. I love coffee, and decaf just isn’t the same. However, I’ve never reached that level of consumption again. Subsequent periods of abstinence have not yielded the same improvement in quality of life as that first time quitting, probably because I haven’t reached a level of use/abuse that negatively impacted how I felt.

Generally, I limit myself to two to three servings a day. That level has been found to be harmless, and maybe even beneficial. However, I have just over a week left in Baltimore before I go to New Orleans for Amanda’s graduation from medical school (w00t!), and I have an awful lot to do. I’m giving myself free license to however much coffee and caffeine I want, and my productivity has been skyrocketing.

I recognize that this level of consumption is not sustainable, and that if I keep it up, I’ll surely pay for it. But wow, does it ever feel awesome for now. If I experience any dramatic shifts in mental or physical state as a result of my use, I’ll tone it down a bit. But for now, I’m just enjoying it and getting a lot done.

This post brought to you by five cups of coffee.