Woe and thermodynamics

Thermodynamics is evil. Statistical thermodynamics verges on obscenity at times. At university I sought to avoid learning much about them and made up by getting good enough marks in everything else.

I am currently having to read up on complex statistical thermodynamics (at way beyond undergraduate level) in order to modify someone else's code in a programming language I don't actually know. Also, I'm under a tight deadline that I'm unlikely to make. Fun!

Students! Do not despise the apparently-useless things in your curriculum. (My father once told me that engineers who grok thermal convection have it made, because such a vast majority of engineering students whimpers and retreats from it.)

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Both Elberry and the Kraken have recently commented on the same subject: the death, or penury, of language, and particularly the overuse of the word "like". I myself am no brilliant user of words, and understand the problem that arises when your thoughts outstrip your tongue, and it becomes necessary either to say "like" a lot or just go "um" and "uh". This is probably why my written English is generally a bit stilted and heavily influenced by what I've been reading recently - I don't have much of a natural idiom, a fluent sense of how to speak and what to say, a protocol for getting my thoughts and words to mesh; which makes my writing doubly artificial, and somewhat chameleonic.

It doesn't help that I've lost my first native language, sort of: I spoke both Welsh and English at the age of five, and would wander round babbling away in Welsh, according to my mother. Then we moved back to England and I lost all of my Welsh except for two words - hogan drwg, "bad boy", and I'm probably spelling them wrong - and lost my Welsh lilt, too, leaving my voice unaccented and monotonous, by British standards - a friend at university told me I spoke like a robot doing a very bad impression of a human being.

(Tangential thought: There's a potential rationalistic explanation for the sense of Original Sin, of being Fallen, of things just not being right, based around Eden simply being a projection of the shared experience of losing childhood simplicity - as Chesterton pointed out, the entire human race has a tradition of the Fall, and all legends say the Earth was kinder in its earlier days. For a Christian, the innocence you lose in growing up - in my case, also, a native language lost in growing up - is a kind of metaphor for the Fall, the loss of original innocence, the loss of the heart's language; for a skeptic, the logic works perfectly the other way round. Strangely, I've never heard this argument pushed much. I guess if you felt that kind of loss strongly enough to think it worth addressing, you wouldn't become a skeptic in the first place - or at least, you wouldn't be so interested in knocking religion, as you'd regard the whole sin/grace/redemption schema of the Christian faith as a kind of communal psychotherapy, which the secular world has no clear alternative to.)

(Also, I'm starting to romanticise my childhood. I'll be getting myself a rocking chair next.)

My mother is even worse at using words, and even more scatterbrained than I am, and conversation with her involves lots of "put the thing in the, you know, thingy, and - what? Look, just do it! - um, you know what I mean, the uh, thing, the -" &c. &c. Clearly there is a family tendency to not get on with words, because I'm going the same way.

God willing I shall produce more art soon, workload permitting. Art I can deal with; language, not so much.