bending_sickle | I'm fair forfochen.*

Oh dear. While staying up till the wee** hours is ftw, it does result in waking up in the non-wee hours of the morning, so non-wee they've practically are wee, just "wee afternoon hours".

Oh crickey, I can't write. That's due in part to my havng been reading stats for the past few hours. See, what I wanted to do today was read all that I had left for stats. I thought, hey, just 17.1-17.2 and then skim through chapters 13, 15 and 18. Easy-peasy, done by the evening.

Hah!

First off, while 17.1-17.2 sounds short, it's really ninja-numbering, in that you have 17.1.1, 17.1.2, 17.1.3 all the way to 17.1.9.

Second, take a look at just exactly the sort of thing that I'm reading:

In practice, the components are extracted either by a spectral decomposition of a sums-of-squares-and-cross-products matrix, a covariance matrix or a correlation matrix among variables or by a singular value decomposition of the raw data matrix with variables stardardized as necessary.

What the flying...? My eyes just glaze over after the first few words. And I haven't picked a particularly obscure sentence, the entire book really is all like that. (Actually, I picked this sentence for the spectral decomposition which brings up totally different images in my head that matrices and stats. It's like Scrouge's worst nightmare and zombie-ism all rolled into one.)

Then there's really wierd stuff that just can't be true. Like the Scree Diagram. Seriously. Scree.

Links of the Day:
Grand List of SF Cliches

crantz's Zombie comic. I like the term "daystar".

soulvamp - written in Spike's (of BtVS) voice and POV. What the devil...?

elvisneedsboats writes about the initial steps in writing: When you start coming up with a new story, how does it happen for you? Do you start with some particular words? Does a picture lodge itself in your head? Or is it something else entirely that I haven't considered?
A list of Scottish (Gaelic, really, I think) words and one more, though less reliable 'cause really it's just mostly phonetic spelling of English words.

* Scots has a number of words which mean tired, weary or worn out: was there something especially tiring about life in Scotland for these words to evolve? Forfochen is often prefixed with fair, so you may have heard your mother say after a busy washing-day, ''I'm fair forfochen''. The word founert is a close relation, but forfochen sounds very much like a weary sigh..., here
** I'll never forget David Tennant's Dr Who Confidential on all the old DW shows, where he said, "When I was wee...". <3