Hello once again RSS Clubbers, and welcome email subscribers! This week I am sharing a few open questions that I have pondered lately. Please enjoy this week’s grab bag, another peek behind the curtain.

  1. What is the source of the infrasonic rumble? You may or may not know that I have a hobby of making field recordings, especially long playing ones. This one, from Quicksilver-Almaden park, is especially boring (which is ideal), and if I remember correctly I tried to mitigate the low frequencies with a high-pass filter, yet the lowest frequencies are still there. At the time I recorded that one, I thought it was “just San Jose” off in the distance. But in the Butano posts, I mention that there is a noticeable low frequency “rumble in the distance”. Maybe it’s two different sources, waves crashing on the coast for one and city noise for the other. I do not know.

  2. Does Virginia Woolf always use so many new-to-me words? Is this unique to her or is it a historical remove thing (i.e. has the common vocabulary diverged in the ~100 years between me-the-reader and her-the-author)? Last week I read The Death of the Moth. Jeff pointed out that there were quite a few unusual words. I had noticed this in the reading and simply moved on, but it is worth pondering a bit more. In the first paragraph alone, I counted four unfamiliar words: benignant1, share2, down3, and vociferation4. There are only five paragraphs in the whole piece. Is this normal? I love it!5 I should read more Woolf to find out. Luckily there are two other essays in my edition of The Norton Reader, so I can get some signal with minimal effort or investment.

  3. Is the fork the most likely object in the dishwasher to hurt you? The only time I have been injured while unloading the dishwasher was by jamming a fork under my fingernail because I didn’t see its edge-on appearance. Like Abbott’s Triangles,6 forks disappear when viewed from certain directions. Knives are another leading candidate for injury-causers, even butter and table knives can cut you. But, forks go up and knives go down in the dishwasher’s silverware rack thing, so knives are in the safe direction. I was not being as careful as usual that day; it hurt! How common is this injury? Is something else more likely to send you searching for a bandaid, and we just don’t put that thing in out dishwasher? Who keeps this sort of statistics?

  4. I observe that traffic seems to slow down significantly on Fridays and Sundays. Is traffic really slower on those days? Everyone sure takes their time around the SFBA when getting from point A to point B, especially on the freeways. On the other hand, it’s probably just me, I’m the one still in a hurry, just 5% more than everyone else. Do you see this in your neck of the woods? What’s the reason, what is driving this phenomenon?

A few thin strips of rubber scattered on wet ashphault. A bright white parking strip line bisects the frame vertically.
Seen this week, during the very unusual for late May rain.

jg

footnotes

  1. Two things: I am linking to Websters 1913 dictionary because a) it’s a good dictionary, b) it’s public domain, c) the website doesn’t have ads, d) it’s got an easy to remember url websters1913.com, and e) it’s contemporary to Woolf. Second, I was able to guess approximately the meanings of some of these words from context or familiarity with alternate suffixes on the same root,7 others I had to puzzle out, and yet more I simply moved on and triangulated back to them later in the piece. I think it was good for my brain. ↩︎

  2. I had always interpreted “plough share” to mean something about a portion of land. And to mean the blade of the plough. Woolf uses “share” here bare, without directly referring to the plough. That’s plow in Americanish, I think. I interpretted Woolf’s usage to mean that second one, but it could also mean the row that has been freshly cut by the plough. ↩︎

  3. The phrase Woolf uses is “…and the down beyond…”. Does she mean the hills on the other side of the fields? Does she mean the “way out there beyond the land I can see before me”? I’m pretty sure the former, maybe it was a common usage in rural England. Because the imagery in the paragraph surrounding this is very diverse and vivid I was even considering feathers for a moment. I settled on hills, like how Tolkien uses it. ↩︎

  4. This is obviously just a different suffix on “vociferous”. Yet I had never seen it before. Neither had Jeff. ↩︎

  5. I am a dictionary nerd. I have, like, so many dang dictionaries. ↩︎

  6. I am unsure of the political correctness / cancelled status / et cetera of the Flatland book. It is a satire written in the 1800s. I neither vouch for or against it, it is a historical document that has some interesting geometrical analogies and thought experiments. That is all. ↩︎

  7. Such as: benignant is obviously related to benign, and vociferation is obviously related to vociferous. But I am getting ahead of myself and possibly you too. ↩︎

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