Random thought #1: This essay makes the point that it’s not our behavior, but our existence that is the offense to the extremists who are at war with us, because (oddly enough) our defeatist attitude leads to our defeat, not to “peace in our time”:
“Al Qaeda considers not the behaviour of Spain, but the existence of Spain, to be offensive. Their propaganda is unambiguous: the terror will stop when “Al Andalus” returns to Shariah.”
And this after Spain caved in to the extremist agenda, after their series of train bombings, back a few years ago! Doesn’t speak well for the present course of action that the West seems keen upon right now, does it?
Random thought #2: Though we’re dealing with record temperatures in the Northwest of the US, earlier this week there was a nearly unprecedented Argentinian snowfall. (Remember, it’s their winter right now…) Hmmm.
I’ve wondered about this for a while–we talk about how much above average (or below average) the temperatures for a given day/week/month have been, as though that is a significant measure. But the point of having an average doesn’t mean that every single day you measure is going to be the same. It’s just that a certain number of (sometimes very highly divergent) measurements of temperature for that given day/week/month, when averaged, come to that number. You could easily say that the average yearly temperature for a given area is 50º F, and then squawk in January about it being 30º below average, and panic in July about it being 30º above average. An average does not mean that once you’ve calculated it, that is the decreed temperature and from then on, every day is going to be that average (though often we talk as though it does). More often, you see a hot summer followed by a cold summer, a dry winter followed by a wet winter, and so on.
I know there’s more to climate science than that, but I think sometimes we forget that these day-by-day, even year-by-year measurements are going to have a lot of diversity in them. (I’d like to see confidence intervals or margins of error for some of these statistics we so glibly cite… but then I’m a math nerd who got a degree in such things… )
Random thought #3: The jargon we speak in the military is sprinkled with lots of idiosyncrasies. We use tons of acronyms, often when ordinary terms would be just as good if not better (and more transparent to the outside world). There are other strangenesses, but one that I noticed today, in an overheard conversation, is this: “However, comma,” where the word “comma” is spoken. I haven’t been able to find anything online about the origin of the phrase, except that it appears to be associated with the Navy (but I hear it all the time in my AF office). It’s used frequently by military bloggers, judging from the kind of hits that a Google search turns up.
Another one that I’ve heard (far less often, thank goodness) is “period. dot.” It’s usually used in the context of a sentence such as “And that’s all–period. Dot.”
Personally, I find it annoying. Why emphasize your spoken conversation by verbalizing punctuation? Maybe I should reply to that sort of thing by, “Wow–exclamation point!” or, “I don’t know–ellipsis…”
Posted by Kjirstin 
