My New Hobby.

My New Hobby…. The other day my roommate and I decided that there was a flaw in the English language. Id point out flaws in other langauges, but my mastery of them leaves quite a bit to be desired. On a tangential note, Ive been taking a crash course in conversational German in preparation for a trip Im taking in two weeks to give a presentation at Mainz Universitat (thats a whole other blog) and if this course is to be believed, the Germans spend a perhaps disturbing amount of time talking about what the women and children are eating. Anyway, we noticed that it was difficult to indicate the intensity without relying on really**n, a problem only exacerbated by sleep deprivation. So we decided to take the ambiguity out of it. How? S.I. prefixes. So if youre kinda excited about something, you can go ahead and say youre kilo-excited. Exam tomorrow that you havent studied for? Femto-cool. You could even apply it to those tricky end-of-relationship conversations: Its not that I dont care, its just that we care on different orders of magnitude. Youre like an exa, and Im at a centi. Whats more, you can apply it to the magnitude of abstraction you take in a subject to indicate your level of understanding. For example, Id say I have a pretty nano-understanding of mechanical engineering, meaning theres little abstraction. Meanwhile, biology hovers around the Tera-level, because Im totally satisfied to believe the human body runs on magic. Try it out, its great fun with your geek friends! Speaking of geek friends, youre bound to make many many more come CPW next week! Up your excitement a few powers of 10. : )