January 03, 2006
Resolutions 2006
No particular order.
1. To have fewer dates like the plots of old "Three's Company" episodes, and more dates like the plots of old "A-Team" episodes.
2. To catch up on cool math. A guy in Wisconsin proved the 'crank' theorem of the Ramanujan partition congruences a few months ago, and I missed it! The basics of Ricci flow, to see what the discussion about Perelman and the Poincare conjecture is about. The new celestial mechanics. (I will let John Derbyshire have the Riemann hypothesis for now, thanks.)
3. To learn New Testament Greek. I've been putting this off long enough, and it's gotta be easier than Tagalog grammar. (After the Angel of Tongues, Babel, created Basque, he decided to go on vacation on Luzon, where he got smashed on calamansi lime gimlets. "Infixes," he cried -- or rather, he slurred -- pausing to zap into existence a few Object-Subject-Verb languages in the jungle somewhere. "Reduplicatives!" he exclaimed, accidentally creating Albanian. "Ergativity!" and all those click languages in southern Africa came into being. And so forth. Then, when he was hung over, Tagalog.)
4. To accept whatever decision Brett Favre makes with a light heart.
5. To visit my friends in far-off places more.
6. To go to the gym five times a week instead of two, like I used to. Screw this getting older business. Plenty of time to be lazy when I'm dead.
7. (optional) To give Finnegan's Wake another stab.
8. (near-term) To finish up the one post on Mendelian inheritance for Carrie at Bad Mama and the other post on the NYC maple syrup smell for the Brooklyn crew.
Posted by coyu at January 3, 2006 03:07 AMI would recommend slogging through about four semesters worth of Classical Greek. Basically just go through Anne Groton's From Alpha to Omega (which someone of your intelligence could probably do in a couple of months or less). After that, the NT will be a breeze. NT is, after all, about the only Greek that I can read without beating my head against the wall in frustration and weeping like a small child.
And, as George Peppard might have said, here's to more plans coming together.
Posted by: Andrew Reeves at January 3, 2006 03:33 AMI resolve to read Martha Stout's "The Sociopath Next Door" and the DSM-IV. Just so I can tell, you know?
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at January 3, 2006 11:59 PM"Three's Company" vs "A-Team" :-) You single people... you know we married guys have to live through ya'll.
On "Finnegan's Wake" - the professor of my "Ulysses" course said it was best to sing it aloud, rather than read it silently.
-A wish for a happy and prosperous 2006 and best of luck on the Septuagint
Posted by: Francis Burdett at January 5, 2006 01:01 AM