"What Should We Call the Professor?"

From a well-researched and funny commentary on a mysterious question:

I came to teaching midcareer, without a doctorate, and didn't give much thought to what I wanted students to call me. Somehow "Ben" didn't seem right--even though, in the professional world, college-student interns always had called me that, no problem. What I wasn't prepared for was being addressed as "Dr. Yagoda." I corrected that the first couple of dozen times, then stopped when it became clear that my quip of choice--"I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV"--wasn't funny. I realized, in any case, that I had to give students a clue to my preference, so I started signing e-mails and syllabuses "Prof. Yagoda."

LINK: Ben Yagoda's essay "What Should We Call the Professor?"

JK Chocolate Truffles

My friend Jim makes truffles. That's like saying that Rolls-Royce makes cars. Jim's truffles are hors commerce (not for sale), but you can at least look by going to his website. The photo gallery alone is worth a visit, with the JK box turning up in the most surprising places.

LINK: JK Chocolate Truffles

Happy anniversary

Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed!
We vowed our true love, though a word wasn't said.
The world was in bloom, there were stars in the skies,
Except for the few that were there in your eyes.

"Anniversary Song" (Al Jolson and Saul Chaplin)

Happy Anniversary, Elaine!

More on e-mail

I added some thoughts this morning to what's become the most visited page on my blog.

LINK: "How to e-mail a professor"

Ithaca?

From BBC News:

An amateur British archaeologist says he has located Ithaca, the homeland of Homer's legendary hero Odysseus.

Robert Bittlestone and two experts say research shows the rocky island in The Odyssey was in the western part of Greek tourist destination Cephalonia.

Satellite imagery was used to match the landscape with descriptions in Homer's poem about the return of the man behind the wooden horse of Troy.

My immediate impulse is to say, It's a story. But Bittlestone and his co-authors have a book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

LINK: " Study 'locates' Homer's Ithaca" (from BBC News)

LINK: Odysseus Unbound : The Search for Homer's Ithaca, by Robert Bittlestone, James Diggle, John Underhill, from Amazon.com

Continental Paper Grading Co.

This picture is me--I mean, I. (I graded eighteen papers in three hours last night and this morning.)

[Photo taken on an Amtrak train leaving Chicago.]

Being productive in college

Various bits of advice from MetaFilter. I especially like the suggestion to use cds as units of studying time (study through one cd, then take a short break, then another cd, and so on).

LINK: "Being productive in college"

[Via 43 Folders.]

100 frequently misspelled words

acceptable
accidentally
accommodate
acquit
a lot
amateur
apparent
argument

From a list of "the 100 words most often misspelled," complete with explanations of why they're easy to misspell. An enterprising person could format these words into columns, print a page (or index card), and save many trips to the dictionary.

LINK: 100 Misspelled Words

[Via lifehack.org.]

Old and improved

I spent some time this weekend rewriting and streamlining a January 2005 post that's had a fair number of hits, "How to e-mail a professor." It's worthwhile reading for any college student.

LINK: "How to e-mail a professor"

Ands

The weaknesses of Microsoft Word's grammar checker are by now well known, via Sandeep Krishnamurthy's eye-opening demonstration. And the inherent weaknesses of any spellchecker should be obvious: the inability to distinguish between their and there, for instance, or to know that proof read should be written as proofread. Yesterday I found a further glitch when reading over a document: Word's spellchecker didn't flag the typo ands.

According to the online Oxford English Dictionary, ands is a word, at least sort of. AND, always in all caps, is a transitive verb, meaning "to combine (sets, binary signals, etc.) using a Boolean AND operator." Sample OED sentence: "The program for plot ANDs X with 7." It's also conceivable that someone might pluralize the conjunction: "This sentence uses too many ands." But wouldn't it make better sense to omit ands from Word's standard dictionary and allow users of Boolean operators to add the word to a custom dictionary? Just asking.

As my wife Elaine Fine has pointed out to me, Word's spellchecker also recognizes Julliard as correct. But the music school is Juilliard. The spellcheckers in both AbiWord and the Writer component of OpenOffice.org let ands go by, but they both flag Julliard as misspelled. Both programs are freeware, which in this case means that you get what you don't pay for--greater accuracy in spelling.