Wikipedia addendum.

Of course, most of the articles in the Esperanto Wikipedia are crap. However, there are a substantial number with substantial human content. If you want to get a taste of how much of a given wikipedia is computer-generated crap, just go to a random page:

• A Random Esperanto Article
• A Random Volapuk Article
• A Random English Article For reference.
• A Random Euskara (Basque) Article

As you can see, most articles are crap, generally. Volapuk is remarkable in that there is little else besides the crap generated by the tools. Project idea: discriminate between these classes of articles.

Why are there so many articles in the Volapuk Wikipedia?

Volapuk was the first popular constructed language. It was popular for maybe a decade before Esperanto took off and stole its base. At its height, there were hundreds of clubs around the world, hundreds of books, hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts. It's an odd language with a lot of funny sounds, it's probably as complicated as German. In Danish, the name has come to mean "nonsense". There are still a few enthusiasts, but people estimate their numbers in the dozens (besides hobbyists who care about all constructed languages but don't have a particular interest in Volapuk). By way of contrast, Esperanto has perhaps 2000 native speakers and they have an annual international congress with 2-4000 attendees from 70-ish countries each year. There has been a continuously active community of tens of thousands for the 125 (exactly!) years of its existence. The commonly quoted number of speakers - 2,000,000 - is a bit inflated, sure. Euskara (Basque) has 700,000 speakers, but almost all of them certainly speak the language and are native speakers, as nobody has any interest in trying to learn it - it's worse than Magyar. I would be surprised if there were 100,000 who spoke Esperanto well enough that somebody with a comparable level of Basque would be counted as a Basque speaker. But, still, there's a community, it includes native speakers, and there are people who do a substantial proportion of their daily communication in it, quite unlike Volapuk.

Why, then, does the Volapuk wikipedia have 120,000 entries? Esperanto, a "legitimate" language, has only about 170,000. A couple dozen enthusiasts and a handful of con-lang nerds who are interested in all con-langs can't, on their own, do that much work on a quality product. And there are plenty of the same sort of demographic in Esperanto, too.

Answer: the Volapuk wikipedia is mostly robot-generated crap. There are few substantive articles. It's mostly full of stubs. There are a large number of machine-translated articles that are very easy to generate (e.g., formulaic articles about each town in Italy). There seems to be a machine-generated stub article for every person who was ever tangentially involved with the Volapuk movement. I'm not saying there isn't some value in this - but this certainly solves the mystery. See their talk page for details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AVolap%C3%BCk and also http://vo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebanibespik:Smeira

If you're interested in hearing more about Volapuk, read Puk, Memory. Even if you're not interested, it's a good article. If you're interested in learning constructed languages, you should learn Esperanto instead of anything else. Nobody should try to learn a language without a use for it (and without using it), and the only constructed language with a community of speakers is Esperanto. If you're interested in learning another language and are in the US, the language you are most likely to be able to learn is whatever dialect of Spanish is most common in your area because there will be people to talk to. But if there's an Esperanto club in town, sure, you could try that, you will definitely be able to get to a "I can express myself incompetently and get the gist of what people say" level much more easily and much faster, but I would not recommend it if you don't have people to talk to.

Other uses of "volapuk" besides the Danish:

• It's a slang term ("волапюк") for rendering Cyrillic characters with ASCII Latin characters.
• A few other languages besides Danish use it as a word for "nonsense" - I don't have a full list. It's used in sentences where we might say, "It's all Greek to me."
• There's a band called Volapuk.
• That's about it.

Climate change: we're all doomed.

Even the unprecedented melting of the Arctic is not enough to signal to us that things are going wrong. We're all boned because the failings of both the market and our democratic system of government (not that anything else would do better) will be incapable of acting until the consequences are irreversible, because this is the sort of thing where consequences generally lag causes by decades. The Arctic situation, unfortunately, seems to be degrading quickly, quicker than we had expected, and the feedback loops associated with it are the sort of thing that we cannot control once they go past a certain (rapidly approaching perhaps impossible to avoid) point.

I have little hope that we can avert the problem. Per capita American energy usage is 5 times the world's, twice Europe's. Our energy usage is, surprisingly, more carbon intensive than the world's. It is a sad country where Obama's position is a subject of mockery, when a mildly objective consideration of the facts indicates that it is perhaps, on the American spectrum, perhaps the farthest "right" that should be included in political discourse (using common American political positions - to my mind, real conservatives should be Roosevelt-style conservationists).

Do the math, kids. Cut your energy usage now.

The Civil War was about slavery

And that's also one of the things the Alamo was about - though certainly not the only thing.

Anyway, school is going fine, the Greek church is okay, disc golf is spotty, picking up heavy things has suffered - haven't really found a way into the gym much. I'm still pretty inconsistent in my driving - Some of the lessons are sinking in, but I'm definitely taking a couple steps back before taking some steps forward in terms of my playing ability. The round I played before the last was definitely one of the worst I can remember. I even lost a disc. The one I played today was okay - a couple major blunders, a couple good shots, a couple great shots, a few birdies or birdie-able shots. I overshot a 334-ft hole by 30 ft accidentally - I gave it a light touch but it kept going. I didn't sink the put, but I hit 2 of my mulligan putts. My putting is definitely getting a bit better these days.

So, anyway, that's the boring stuff.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, fast is far.

I've been playing disc golf a bit since my arrival in $COLLEGETOWN because my golf discs were around, there actually are courses around, and I didn't really have many responsibilities for a few days. In $URBAN_AREA, I would've had to drive an hour to the suburbs to do it, which is Not Fun and generally Not Happening. Even though, in general, it was one of the densest areas in the country for disc golf.

Anyway, it's been about a decade since I last played regularly, and I've been reading a bit over the last weeks about technique. The title is profound if you know what it means, I've been working on figuring it out. I'm not a very good driver. I could hit 300-350' back in the day. But some guy on dgcoursereview.com and discgolfreview.com insists that some simple form adjustments and the above mantra are enough to get most people up to much better distance. So I've been working a little and seeing some dividends. I've been overshooting a few holes with my putter, I put a light touch and a slow run-up today on a drive (with a driver) and overshot a 293' hole (dead on the line, too) by 60-70'. Of course, with some of the drills I'm doing, it's making some of my shots a little inconsistent as I adjust. But I feel I can consistently hit 250' of golf distance with my Aviar and 275' happens regularly - going slow and with a light touch. The course is a bit too small and narrow to try to hit longer, even if you're on the pro tees which, for whatever reason, I'm not.

Anyway, there's an intramural disc golf tournament at $UNIVERSITY in a couple weeks, so, why not? I'll brush up, it'll be good. It'll be on a course where I can see whether I've gotten a good increase in line-drive distance.

PS For whatever reason, I've been wise in my disc purchases. I only really use four discs: Cyclone, Aviar, Roc, sometimes XL. All slow, consistent discs that teach you to play real golf. A lot of people go overboard and buy discs way beyond their skill level. If you're interested in taking up the hobby, pay attention to discgolfreview.com and other sites when they say not to buy lost of shiny fast plastic: they're right. Play a lot with mid-range discs and putters. I can get 275' out of my Aviar just on "slow is smooth". And here's a great video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nED7gcXobEo

We're putting the band back together

I've been inconsistent in the past 18 months about my hobby of picking up heavy things and putting them down, but the last 2 months have been relatively consistent and I'm probably about 50# at most off of my top lifts in all categories for an easy total of 500kg. 200-100-200, plus or minus some change. I'm getting strength back right quick, so maybe, just maybe, I could consider making a 500# squat a goal for the end of the year. I'm going back to grad school, the gym the powerlifters use is right near the stats building, and I won't have much else to do besides stats and squats, so call me maybe? It's too early to call it a goal, though. It's more a vague idea of a possibility.

The only thing I have to say about that is that my bench is embarrassing and I have no prospect of making it reasonable.