Tag Archives: words

Kaizen

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kaizen

I painted this many years ago, as a classroom poster, and then moved it from classroom to classroom, for years, until the posterboard on which it was painted was finally too damaged for further use. At some point, I will have to make a replacement.

Kaizen is a Japanese word which translates only loosely into English, as “continuous improvement.” To me, it means more than that:  it means never being content with simply staying the person I am today, and going to sleep, each night, with the sincere intention to be a better person tomorrow.

Does this always actually work, as each day becomes the next one? No, I must admit that it doesn’t — but that does nothing to change the fact that keeping the kaizen principle in mind is an excellent way to live one’s life. On a year-to-year basis, it works much better, in practice, than it does from day to day. I am confident that I am a better person now than I was 365 days ago, even though there have, of course, been ups and downs, as the last year has passed.

Setbacks, which happen to everyone, are no reason to give up, and personal improvement, in all important parts of life, will always be a goal worth pursuing.

The Eleven Oddball Symbols on the Periodic Table of the Elements

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periodic table oddballs

Most symbols for elements on the periodic table are easy to learn, such as those for carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen:  C, O, and N. There are eleven “oddballs,” though, because their symbols originated in other languages (Latin, mostly), and do not match their English names. Here’s a list of them, by atomic number, with an explanation for each.

11. Na stands for sodium because this element used to be called natrium.

19. K stands for potassium, for this element’s name used to be kalium.

26. Fe stands for iron because this element was formerly named ferrum.

29. Cu stands for copper because it used to be called cuprum.

47. Ag’s (silver’s) old name was argentum.

50. Sn’s (tin’s) name used to be stannum.

51. Antimony’s symbol, Sb, came from its former name, stibium.

74. Tungsten, with the symbol W, was once called wolfram. In some parts of the world, it still goes by that name, in fact.

79. Gold (Au) was called aurum in past centuries.

80. Mercury’s (Hg’s) old name is impossible (for me, anyway) to say five times, quickly:  hydrargyrum.

82. Lead (Pb) was once called plumbum because plumbers used it to weight the lower end of plumb-lines.

I think learning things is easier, with longer retention, if one knows the reasons behind the facts, rather than simply attempting rote memorization.

“Antisemitism” has become an inherently confusing word. Here’s how to fix this problem.

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When referring to the Holocaust, it never caused confusion to refer to Nazis as “antisemitic.” German is not a Semitic language, and the non-Semite Nazis were trying to exterminate an ethnoreligious group, the Jews, who are a Semitic people. In that context, the word “antisemitism,” in a European setting, is not difficult to understand. This is also true of antisemitism earlier in European history.

Decades later, and outside of Europe, however, the situation has changed, and the word “antisemitism” is now far less clear in its meaning. The one nation most closely identified with the Jewish people is Israel, and Israel is not in conflict with Germany. Israel is, of course, currently in an active conflict with an organization, Hamas, which has been firing rockets from nearby Gaza across the border, into Israel. In response, Israel has been retaliating, using even greater force than that wielded by Hamas. In this current conflict, there have been numerous deaths of noncombatants, including many children, in Gaza, but no deaths (so far) in Israel. For this reason, some people have raised their voices in criticism of the actions of the Israeli government in the current conflict. Predictably, but not logically, those who are criticizing Israel’s actions are now being accused of antisemitism.

When the word “antisemitic” gets thrown around, in the context of conflicts in the Middle East which involve Israel, it doesn’t help anyone understand anything. The word is actually an impediment to understanding. The reason for this is that “Semite” does not mean what many people think it means. For one thing, most Semites are not Jews.

“Semites” refers to a collection of ethnolinguistic groups — people who speak, or are descended from those who spoke, any of a large collection of languages known as the Semitic languages . . . and one of the Semitic languages is Arabic. Are Jews Semites? Yes, they are, but so are Arabs. The current conflict in the Middle East is a conflict between two different groups of people, both of whom are Semitic. To throw the emotionally-charged word “antisemitic” into the middle of the fray, therefore, makes no sense. It increases confusion, and clarifies nothing. The word also further enflames the emotions of those arguing and fighting, on both sides, in a situation where the exact opposite is needed.

It doesn’t help that many Westerners believe a fallacy related to Arabs, using “Arab” (which refers to an ethnic group) interchangeably with “Muslim,” which is not an ethnic term at all, but one that simply refers to anyone who practices the religion known as Islam. In reality, there are many Arabs who are not Muslims, and there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who are not Arabs. For example, consider the people who live in Iran. The governments of Israel and Iran are often hostile to each other, and Iran has very few Arabs, despite being a nation where an overwhelming majority practice Islam.

When Israel has conflicts with other nations (or organizations, for Hamas is not a nation) in the Middle East, those conflicts are political in nature, with religion playing a strong role as well. Israel is associated with the religion of Judaism (even though much of its Jewish population is only ethnically Jewish, not Jewish in the religious sense of the term), and is often in conflict with others in the Middle East who are associated with the religion called Islam. “Antisemitic,” used as a synonym for anti-Jewish bigotry, is an unfortunate misnomer, but there are alternatives which are better, in the sense that they are more specific, and therefore more clear. There is already a word in common use for fear and hatred of Islam and/or Muslims:  “Islamophobia.”  The corresponding term for fear and hatred of Judaism and/or Jews, including those who are Jewish only in the ethnic sense of the word, is “Judeophobia.” Most of the time, when people use the word “antisemitism,” they actually mean Judeophobia. Since Arabs are, themselves, a subset of the Semites, it would be illogical to refer to a specific person who is both an Arab, and a hater of Jews, as an “antisemitic Arab.”  To describe that person as a “Judeophobic Arab,” on the other hand, makes perfect sense.

Finally, it must be recognized that there are numerous people, within both Judaism and Islam, who do not have within them the blind, furious hatred of the other group that has caused so much death and destruction in the Middle East since the founding of the modern nation of Israel, in the years following World War II. I am referring, of course, to non-Islamophobic Jews, and non-Judeophobic Muslims. One does not often see them featured in the news, especially when conflicts such as the current one are raging, but such people do exist, and their existence should give all people who prefer peace over war hope for the future. May their numbers increase.

Attention, Tumblr: Learn the Meaning of the Word “Literally”

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I just got an e-mail, from Tumblr (I used to blog a lot there, before coming here to WordPress). The e-mail has the title, “Your Dashboard is literally on fire.” I’m now afraid to go look at my car, OR log on to my old Tumblr account. I dislike being burned.

Five of the Thirteen Archimedean Solids Have Multiple English Names

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Four Archimedean Solids with Multiple English Names

I call the polyhedron above the rhombcuboctahedron. Other names for it are the rhombicuboctahedron (note the “i”), the small rhombcuboctahedron, and the small rhombicuboctahedron. Sometimes, the word “small,” when it appears, is put in parentheses. Of these multiple names, all of which I have seen in print, the second one given above is the most common, but I prefer to leave the “i” out, simply to make the word look and sound less like “rhombicosidodecahedron,” one of the polyhedra coming later in this post.

Trunc Cubocta

My preferred name for this polyhedron is the great rhombcuboctahedron, and it is also called the great rhombicuboctahedron. The only difference there is the “i,” and my reasoning for preferring the first name is the same as with its “little brother,” above. However, as with the first polyhedron in this post, the “i”-included version is more common than the name I prefer.

Unfortunately, this second polyhedron has another name, one I intensely dislike, but probably the most popular one of all — the truncated cuboctahedron. Johannes Kepler came up with this name, centuries ago, but there’s a big problem with it: if you truncate a cuboctahedron, you don’t get square faces where the truncated parts are removed. Instead, you get rectangles, and then have to deform the result to turn the rectangles into squares. Other names for this same polyhedron include the rhombitruncated cuboctahedron (given it by Magnus Wenninger) and the omnitruncated cube or cantitruncated cube (both of these names originated with Norman Johnson). My source for the named originators of these names is the Wikipedia article for this polyhedron, and, of course, the sources cited there.

Rhombicosidodeca

This third polyhedron (which, incidentally, is the one of the thirteen Archimedean solids I find most attractive) is most commonly called the rhombicosidodecahedron. To my knowledge, no one intentionally leaves out the “i” after “rhomb-” in this name, and, for once, the most popular name is also the one I prefer. However, it also has a “big brother,” just like the polyhedron at the top of this post. For that reason, this polyhedron is sometimes called the small rhombicosidodecahedron, or even the (small) rhombicosidodecahedron, parentheses included.

Trunc Icosidodeca

I call this polyhedron the great rhombicosidodecahedron, and many others do as well — that is its second-most-popular name, and identifies it as the “big brother” of the third polyhedron shown in this post. Less frequently, you will find it referred to as the rhombitruncated icosidodecahedron (coined by Wenninger) or the omnitruncated dodecahedron or icosahedron (names given it by Johnson). Again, Wikipedia, and the sources cited there, are my sources for these attributions.

While I don’t use Wenninger’s nor Johnson’s names for this polyhedron, their terms for it don’t bother me, either, for they represent attempts to reduce confusion, rather than increase it. As with the second polyhedron shown above, this confusion started with Kepler, who, in his finite wisdom, called this polyhedron the truncated icosidodecahedron — a name which has “stuck” through the centuries, and is still its most popular name. However, it’s a bad name, unlike the others given it by Wenninger and Johnson. Here’s why: if you truncate an icosidodecahedron (just as with the truncation of a cuboctahedron, described in the commentary about the second polyhedron pictured above), you don’t get the square faces you see here. Instead, the squares come out of the truncation as rectangles, and then edge lengths must be adjusted in order to make all the faces regular, once more. I see that as cheating, and that’s why I wish the name “truncated icosidodecahedron,” along with “truncated cuboctahedron” for the great rhombcuboctahedron, would simply go away.

Here’s the last of the Archimedean solids with more than one English name:

Trunc Cube

Most who recognize this shape, including myself, call it the truncated cube. A few people, though, are extreme purists when it comes to Greek-derived words — worse than me, and I take that pretty far sometimes — and they won’t even call an ordinary (Platonic) cube a cube, preferring “hexahedron,” instead. These same people, predictably, call this Archimedean solid the truncated hexahedron. They are, technically, correct, I must admit. However, with the cube being, easily, the polyhedron most familiar to the general public, almost none of whom know, let alone use, the word “hexahedron,” this alternate term for the truncated cube will, I am certain, never gain much popularity.

It is unfortunate that five of the thirteen Archimedean solids have multiple names, for learning to spell and pronounce just one name for each of them would be task enough. Unlike in the field of chemistry, however, geometricians have no equivalent to the IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemists), the folks who, among other things, select official, permanent names and symbols for newly-synthesized elements. For this reason, the multiple-name problem for certain polyhedra isn’t going away, any time soon.

(Image credit:  a program called Stella 4d, available at www.software3d.com/Stella.php, was used to create all of the pictures in this post.)

On Sportsball, As Viewed By One Aspie

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On the Varieties of Sportsball

Since I live in the American South, I hear a lot of talk about about sportsball. I have a hard time, though, telling exactly which variety of sportsball is being discussed. I don’t find sportsball interesting, and so I’m not fluent in any variant of sportsball jargon. For that reason, it can be difficult for me to tell which sportsballspeak-dialect is being used.

So, sometimes, just to try to make friendly conversation (while still being myself), I ask sportsball-fans questions, in order to find out which version they’re so intently discussing. (Figuring out why people obsessively talk about sportsball so much, I think, is a mystery I’ll never solve. Understanding the strange behavior of non-Aspies is much more difficult than the types of problems I enjoy trying to solve. As Albert Einstein said, when declining the presidency of Israel, “I have no head for human problems.”)

Here’s an example of one such question: “Are you talking about the type of sportsball often played inside, with a bunch of people chasing an orange sphere around on a wooden rectangle, and trying to get the sphere to pass through a metallic, elevated circle of slightly larger diameter than the sphere itself?”

Now, if someone mentions the sportsball game most people call “football,” there’s an obvious follow-up question that needs to be asked . . . so, of course, I ask it:  “Which one?”

Replies to that question usually go something like this: “Whaddya mean, which one? Football! We’re talking about football, ya nerd!”

“But there are at least two games called by that name, which confuses me. Do you mean the sportsball-version where the players chase a prolate spheroid, or a rounded version of a truncated icosahedron?”

If they don’t understand that question, I attempt clarification: “You know, both those versions of sportsball are played on rectangles covered with grass . . . but the one with the prolate spheroid has two giant tuning forks at opposite sides end of the grassy rectangle, is usually played in the USA, and has a far higher rate of injuries, even fatal ones. The one that uses a truncated icosahedron doesn’t have tuning forks, is called ‘football’ by far more people than that American game, and isn’t nearly as dangerous. I think it’s at least a little more interesting than that other game people call ‘football,’ because of the Archimedean solid they chase around, since I like polyhedra. Which one are you discussing?”

If they tell me they’re talking about American football, I usually follow-up with a brief rant, for that sportsball-variant’s name confuses me. “Why do people call it that, anyway? I’ve seen it being play a few times — not for a full game, of course, but I can stand to watch it for a few minutes. That’s long enough to tell that the players only rarely use their feet to kick the prolate spheroid, and usually carry or throw it instead, using, of course, their hands. They usually use their feet just to run around chasing each other. Calling that version of sportsball by the term ‘football’ doesn’t make sense at all. In the game the rest of the world calls ‘football,’ the players kick the ball all the time, so I can understand why it has that name, but that prolate-spheroid version really should be called something else! Also, why are the games sometimes called ‘bowl games?’ They still play on a rectangle, and chase a prolate spheroid — there’s no actual bowl involved, is there?”

On occasion, they aren’t talking about any of these three varieties, though, but yet another form of sportsball. (Why are there so many?)

baseball

“Oh! You must mean the one played on a ninety-degree sector of a circle, with a square (confusingly called a ‘diamond,’ for some reason) in its interior, positioned such that one of its vertices is at the circle’s center. At that vertex, there’s a convex-but-still-irregular pentagon on the ground, while the other three vertices of the large, grass-covered square have much smaller squares on the ground, instead of a pentagon. The guy standing at the pentagon is always trying to hit a red-and-white sphere with a wooden or aluminum stick, but he usually misses. The guy who throws the sphere toward the region above that pentagon usually scratches himself, and spits — a lot. He must be important in some way, for he’s provided with a small hill to stand on, literally placing him above the rest of the players. Have I got it now?”

Sometimes, people try to get me to stop calling these strange activities “sportsball,” by bringing up hockey as an objection. “You can’t call all sports ‘sportsball!’ What about hockey? It doesn’t even have ball! It’s got a puck!”

I’m always ready for this objection, though. “You mean the one with the short black cylinder that slides across ice? That’s a sport? I thought it was just an excuse to have fights!”

Some Polygons with Irritating Names

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Some Polygons with Irritating Names

These polygons are known to virtually all speakers of English as the triangle and the quadrilateral, but that doesn’t mean I have to like that fact, and, the truth is, I don’t. Why? There are a couple of reasons, all involving lack of consistency with the established names of other polygons.

Consider the names of the next few polygons, as the number of sides increases: the pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, and octagon. The “-gon” suffix refers to the corners, or angles, of these figures, and is derived from Greek, The end of the word “triangle” also refers to the same thing — but not in Greek. For the sake of consistency, triangles should, instead, be called “trigons.”

In the case of the quadrilateral, the problem is twofold. The suffix “-lateral” refers to sides, not angles. For the sake of consistency, “-gon” should be used instead. The prefix “quadri-” does mean four, of course, but is derived from Latin, not Greek. We use the Greek prefix “tetra-” to refer to four when naming polyhedra (“tetrahedron”), so why not use it for polygons with four sides, also? The best name available for four-sided polygons requires a change in both the prefix and suffix of the word, resulting in the name “tetragon” for the figure on the right.

When I listed the names of higher polygons above, I deliberately stopped with the octagon. Here’s the next polygon, with nine sides and angles:

polygons

I’m guilty of inconsistency with the name of nine-sided polygons, myself. All over this blog, you can find references to “nonagons,” and the prefix “nona-” is derived from Latin. Those who already know better have, for years, been calling nine-sided polygons “enneagons,” using the Greek prefix for nine, rather than the Latin prefix, for reasons of consistency. I’m not going to go to the trouble to go back and edit every previous post on this blog to change “nonagon” to “enneagon,” at least right now, but, in future posts, I will join those who use “enneagon.”

Here’s one more, with eleven sides:

polygons

I don’t remember ever blogging about polygons with eleven sides, but I have told geometry students, in the past, that they are called “undecagons.” I won’t make that mistake again, for the derivation of that word, as is the case with “nonagon,” uses both Latin and Greek. A better name for the same figure, already in use, is “hendecagon,” and I’m joining the ranks of those who use that term, derived purely from Greek, effective immediately.

With “hendecagon” and “enneagon,” I don’t think use of these better names will cause confusion, given that they are already used with considerable frequency. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with the little-used, relatively-unknown words “trigon” and “tetragon,” so I’ll still be using those more-familiar names I don’t like, just to avoid being asked “What’s a trigon?” or “What’s a tetragon?” repeatedly, for three- and four-sided polygons. Sometimes, I must concede, it is necessary to choose the lesser of two irritations. With “triangle” and “quadrilateral,” this is one of those times.

The Vacuum Cleaner Enigma

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The Vacuum Cleaner Enigma

A vacuum is, by definition, a region of space devoid of matter. While a perfect vacuum is a physical impossibility, very good approximations exist. Interplanetary space is good, especially far from the sun. Interstellar space is better, and intergalactic space is even better than that.

Along come humans, then, and they invent these things:

vacuum-cleaner-upright

. . . and call them “vacuum cleaners.”

Now, this makes absolutely no sense. There isn’t anything cleaner than a vacuum — and the closer to an ideal vacuum a real vacuum comes, the cleaner it gets. Since vacuums are the cleanest regions of space around already, why would anyone pay good money for a machine that supposedly cleans them? They’re already clean!

Even cleaning in general is a puzzle, without vacuums being involved at all. To attempt to clean something — anything — is, by definition, an attempt to fight the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Isn’t it obvious that any such effort is, in the long run, doomed from the outset?

—–

[Image note:  I didn’t create the images for this post, but found them using Google. I assume they are in the public domain.]

Circumslices

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Circumslices

Regions between close-packed circles of equal radius resemble triangles, but with 60 degree arcs replacing the sides. As these regions are the only things left of a plane after all such circles are sliced out, and they each are outside all the circles used, I’ve decided to name them “circumslices.” Interestingly, the three interior angles of a circumslice each asymptotically approach zero degrees, as one approaches circumslice-vertices, which are also the points of contact of the circles.

Why did I name these things “circumslices?” Because they needed a name, that’s why!