Mute

For the past six days, I have had a cold that includes coughing, soreness, and headaches. For the past four days, I have been unable to speak above a whisper, and only then very slowly and not too long. Though I have been at home most of the time, it has been a slight inconvenience.

Hand signals and large gestures have certainly been useful. (I still need a way to indicate that I can't talk.) Asking people for things hurts my throat too much, so I found myself getting up to do it myself. Spurious communications such as "OK" or "Thank you" have been mostly eliminated, damaging politeness but saving information density and my throat.

In public places, I haven't spoken up very much at all. Doing so would probably produce a discussion, and I can't handle that. Instead, I've just listened to the speaker and probably understood more of the message than those busy formulating their next response. I reacted with appropriate nonverbals, of course, but not having to do anything in a conversation is really relaxing.

This entire experience has made me realize that I really don't have to say much to do life. Of course, school is pretty important and recommends communication, but there are always notebooks and computers. I think this whole ordeal has had a positive aspect, despite the headaches and coughs.

Maybe I'll visit a monastery and take a vow of silence.

Complicated Citations: Just Stop

Every high school and college student has had the displeasure of wrangling bibliographies (or "works cited" sections, excuse me) for whatever citation format their discipline and educational institution embraces. Whether it's MLA, APA, Chicago, or whatever Ms. Turabian decided to unleash upon the world, no citation format is easy to write or intuitive to read, especially if you're trying to cite an Internet source that isn't a periodical or a database.

Nobody has time for that

If the point of citations and a bibliography is to help you find stuff, then just use the universal identifiers and dispose of all the other cruft that can easily be looked up. Don't bother including all these weird fields like publishing city; just provide directions to find what you're talking about. If certain fields to need to be included (like author or date), don't use some crazy FORTRAN-style blob; use a table with headers for what the fields mean or, you know, words.

For web pages (which are overwhelmingly what students are going to want to cite), URLs should be all we need. Of course, the world isn't forever, URLs change. Maybe freeze it in the Wayback Machine or provide some search keywords that produce the desired page as the first result.

For books, include an ISBN and optimally a link to an eBook/PDF. Hunting down a rare book or one with a super-generic title is not fun.

For scholarly articles, anything worth citing should have a DOI. Include a URL of at least the abstract. Hopefully the actual article isn't behind a paywall!

Sadly, it isn't likely that schools are going to give up formal citation schemes soon. Accepting multiple formats would be a doable step in the right direction.

Chamber Orchestra

I am currently taking a Music Appreciation class at the local community college (something to do during winter break) and one of the assignments is to attend and report on a concert. There was only one such event reasonably close to me being held before the assignment is due, so I went to that event tonight. It was a chamber music performance in a local church's chapel. There were two performers, one on the violin and one on the acoustic guitar. They played several classical pieces (from around the 17th century), including ones from Bach and Dowland. During the performance, I wrote notes in a notebook so that I could compile the report intelligently. I enjoyed the event and I might go to another such thing outside of this class - that should be even more relaxing because I won't have to be constantly writing!