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Oct. 28th, 2009 04:15 pmClever book title of the day:
Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Book
Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Book
(no subject)
Oct. 28th, 2009 04:15 pmClever book title of the day:
Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Book
Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Book
(no subject)
Jul. 22nd, 2009 01:38 pmSaw this puzzle in a book I am cataloging today and am very confused.
Which toothpick would you need to move to create two, and only two, squares?
This is multiple-choice; the answers are 8, 5, 9, or 7.
It's taken me a while of looking at it to conclude that the answer I think they want is 9 (move it to connect 7 and 1, and you have a small square in the upper left corner of a bigger one). But without looking at the answers at first, I thought 4 or 3 or 2 could work, moved to the same space (yielding two small squares stacked on top of each other, and an open figure on the right), which you can also do with 5; and similarly, 8 or 7 can be moved to bisect the right rectangle and leave the open figure on the left.
Am I just dumb (this is in an IQ test after all; I am not brilliant with this sort of spatial stuff) or is the question really misleadingly phrased? To me "two and only two squares" means "two squares, no more and no fewer" but doesn't specify anything about the other toothpicks. It seems like they may have meant "two squares and nothing else, no open ends left".
Which toothpick would you need to move to create two, and only two, squares?
This is multiple-choice; the answers are 8, 5, 9, or 7.
It's taken me a while of looking at it to conclude that the answer I think they want is 9 (move it to connect 7 and 1, and you have a small square in the upper left corner of a bigger one). But without looking at the answers at first, I thought 4 or 3 or 2 could work, moved to the same space (yielding two small squares stacked on top of each other, and an open figure on the right), which you can also do with 5; and similarly, 8 or 7 can be moved to bisect the right rectangle and leave the open figure on the left.
Am I just dumb (this is in an IQ test after all; I am not brilliant with this sort of spatial stuff) or is the question really misleadingly phrased? To me "two and only two squares" means "two squares, no more and no fewer" but doesn't specify anything about the other toothpicks. It seems like they may have meant "two squares and nothing else, no open ends left".
(no subject)
Jul. 22nd, 2009 01:38 pmSaw this puzzle in a book I am cataloging today and am very confused.
Which toothpick would you need to move to create two, and only two, squares?
This is multiple-choice; the answers are 8, 5, 9, or 7.
It's taken me a while of looking at it to conclude that the answer I think they want is 9 (move it to connect 7 and 1, and you have a small square in the upper left corner of a bigger one). But without looking at the answers at first, I thought 4 or 3 or 2 could work, moved to the same space (yielding two small squares stacked on top of each other, and an open figure on the right), which you can also do with 5; and similarly, 8 or 7 can be moved to bisect the right rectangle and leave the open figure on the left.
Am I just dumb (this is in an IQ test after all; I am not brilliant with this sort of spatial stuff) or is the question really misleadingly phrased? To me "two and only two squares" means "two squares, no more and no fewer" but doesn't specify anything about the other toothpicks. It seems like they may have meant "two squares and nothing else, no open ends left".
Which toothpick would you need to move to create two, and only two, squares?
This is multiple-choice; the answers are 8, 5, 9, or 7.
It's taken me a while of looking at it to conclude that the answer I think they want is 9 (move it to connect 7 and 1, and you have a small square in the upper left corner of a bigger one). But without looking at the answers at first, I thought 4 or 3 or 2 could work, moved to the same space (yielding two small squares stacked on top of each other, and an open figure on the right), which you can also do with 5; and similarly, 8 or 7 can be moved to bisect the right rectangle and leave the open figure on the left.
Am I just dumb (this is in an IQ test after all; I am not brilliant with this sort of spatial stuff) or is the question really misleadingly phrased? To me "two and only two squares" means "two squares, no more and no fewer" but doesn't specify anything about the other toothpicks. It seems like they may have meant "two squares and nothing else, no open ends left".
our light is our voice
Jan. 6th, 2008 12:58 pmOver on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
esmestrella I've talked sometimes about how Severus is one of only a tiny handful of characters in Harry Potter that are "alive" to me, and about the only one who "has a voice". (I've pursued that thought a little into "only things with voices are alive", but the woo-woo metaphysics of that, including what exactly I mean by "voice" in that context, is something for another time.) Buried in the comments on a recent pottersues post is a little discussion on The Dragonriders of Pern, which reminded me that I brought up just that example when talking about this a little with enotsola the other day.
I had been reading Nerilka's Story because it was there in the bathroom, and I remarked on how flat all the characters seemed. I thought about it a bit, and in my opinion that's the case for most of the series. A lot of the characters have no "voice". And like Harry Potter, there's a fairly small group of breakaways -- Mnementh, Ruth, Ramoth, Lessa, Manora, F'nor (not so much F'lar), Menolly, Piemur, Fandarel -- and as with Severus, there's one who is the instant "oh, hands down, he's the strongest": Masterharper Robinton. (enotsola immediately agreed with me on this point; YMMV.) Don't get me wrong, I like the Pern series; just I think that writing multidimensional characters that seem to naturally grow out of their environments was not really Anne McCaffrey's strong suit here. (She did much better with the Harper Hall trilogy, I think. Dragonsinger -- the one in the middle -- was the book that got me into Pern in the first place.)
By contrast, though many characters in, say, The Lord of the Rings are certainly minor, I don't have a feel-memory of thinking that any of them are flat. (I've read it what, four or five times?) It's not really fair to compare either of these two relatively light fantasy series to LotR, so take with grain of salt, but I was just observing the phenomenon. Almost everyone comes off the page in De Lint's Newford stories, too, which is closer to Harry Potter and Pern for scope.
I'm not that widely read in fiction, though, so I'm curious what other characters y'all would place in this category of Quendi (in the sense of "speakers; those who speak with voices").
esmestrella I've talked sometimes about how Severus is one of only a tiny handful of characters in Harry Potter that are "alive" to me, and about the only one who "has a voice". (I've pursued that thought a little into "only things with voices are alive", but the woo-woo metaphysics of that, including what exactly I mean by "voice" in that context, is something for another time.) Buried in the comments on a recent pottersues post is a little discussion on The Dragonriders of Pern, which reminded me that I brought up just that example when talking about this a little with enotsola the other day. I had been reading Nerilka's Story because it was there in the bathroom, and I remarked on how flat all the characters seemed. I thought about it a bit, and in my opinion that's the case for most of the series. A lot of the characters have no "voice". And like Harry Potter, there's a fairly small group of breakaways -- Mnementh, Ruth, Ramoth, Lessa, Manora, F'nor (not so much F'lar), Menolly, Piemur, Fandarel -- and as with Severus, there's one who is the instant "oh, hands down, he's the strongest": Masterharper Robinton. (
enotsola immediately agreed with me on this point; YMMV.) Don't get me wrong, I like the Pern series; just I think that writing multidimensional characters that seem to naturally grow out of their environments was not really Anne McCaffrey's strong suit here. (She did much better with the Harper Hall trilogy, I think. Dragonsinger -- the one in the middle -- was the book that got me into Pern in the first place.)By contrast, though many characters in, say, The Lord of the Rings are certainly minor, I don't have a feel-memory of thinking that any of them are flat. (I've read it what, four or five times?) It's not really fair to compare either of these two relatively light fantasy series to LotR, so take with grain of salt, but I was just observing the phenomenon. Almost everyone comes off the page in De Lint's Newford stories, too, which is closer to Harry Potter and Pern for scope.
I'm not that widely read in fiction, though, so I'm curious what other characters y'all would place in this category of Quendi (in the sense of "speakers; those who speak with voices").
our light is our voice
Jan. 6th, 2008 12:58 pmOver on esmestrella I've talked sometimes about how Severus is one of only a tiny handful of characters in Harry Potter that are "alive" to me, and about the only one who "has a voice". (I've pursued that thought a little into "only things with voices are alive", but the woo-woo metaphysics of that, including what exactly I mean by "voice" in that context, is something for another time.) Buried in the comments on a recent pottersues post is a little discussion on The Dragonriders of Pern, which reminded me that I brought up just that example when talking about this a little with enotsola the other day.
I had been reading Nerilka's Story because it was there in the bathroom, and I remarked on how flat all the characters seemed. I thought about it a bit, and in my opinion that's the case for most of the series. A lot of the characters have no "voice". And like Harry Potter, there's a fairly small group of breakaways -- Mnementh, Ruth, Ramoth, Lessa, Manora, F'nor (not so much F'lar), Menolly, Piemur, Fandarel -- and as with Severus, there's one who is the instant "oh, hands down, he's the strongest": Masterharper Robinton. (enotsola immediately agreed with me on this point; YMMV.) Don't get me wrong, I like the Pern series; just I think that writing multidimensional characters that seem to naturally grow out of their environments was not really Anne McCaffrey's strong suit here. (She did much better with the Harper Hall trilogy, I think. Dragonsinger -- the one in the middle -- was the book that got me into Pern in the first place.)
By contrast, though many characters in, say, The Lord of the Rings are certainly minor, I don't have a feel-memory of thinking that any of them are flat. (I've read it what, four or five times?) It's not really fair to compare either of these two relatively light fantasy series to LotR, so take with grain of salt, but I was just observing the phenomenon. Almost everyone comes off the page in De Lint's Newford stories, too, which is closer to Harry Potter and Pern for scope.
I'm not that widely read in fiction, though, so I'm curious what other characters y'all would place in this category of Quendi (in the sense of "speakers; those who speak with voices").
esmestrella I've talked sometimes about how Severus is one of only a tiny handful of characters in Harry Potter that are "alive" to me, and about the only one who "has a voice". (I've pursued that thought a little into "only things with voices are alive", but the woo-woo metaphysics of that, including what exactly I mean by "voice" in that context, is something for another time.) Buried in the comments on a recent pottersues post is a little discussion on The Dragonriders of Pern, which reminded me that I brought up just that example when talking about this a little with enotsola the other day. I had been reading Nerilka's Story because it was there in the bathroom, and I remarked on how flat all the characters seemed. I thought about it a bit, and in my opinion that's the case for most of the series. A lot of the characters have no "voice". And like Harry Potter, there's a fairly small group of breakaways -- Mnementh, Ruth, Ramoth, Lessa, Manora, F'nor (not so much F'lar), Menolly, Piemur, Fandarel -- and as with Severus, there's one who is the instant "oh, hands down, he's the strongest": Masterharper Robinton. (
enotsola immediately agreed with me on this point; YMMV.) Don't get me wrong, I like the Pern series; just I think that writing multidimensional characters that seem to naturally grow out of their environments was not really Anne McCaffrey's strong suit here. (She did much better with the Harper Hall trilogy, I think. Dragonsinger -- the one in the middle -- was the book that got me into Pern in the first place.)By contrast, though many characters in, say, The Lord of the Rings are certainly minor, I don't have a feel-memory of thinking that any of them are flat. (I've read it what, four or five times?) It's not really fair to compare either of these two relatively light fantasy series to LotR, so take with grain of salt, but I was just observing the phenomenon. Almost everyone comes off the page in De Lint's Newford stories, too, which is closer to Harry Potter and Pern for scope.
I'm not that widely read in fiction, though, so I'm curious what other characters y'all would place in this category of Quendi (in the sense of "speakers; those who speak with voices").