Gongol.com Archives: July 2025
July 31, 2025
Ode to the dictionary in an unfashionable age
Of all the forms of educational technology that have ever been introduced, from the pencil to the chalkboard to the personal computer, perhaps the most elegant is the humble desktop dictionary. Think of its many magnificent features. ■ The dictionary is effectively self-contained: Starting from the knowledge of only a few basic words, a child can construct the meanings of all other words by building from one entry to another. ■ It manages to be comprehensive and yet compact at the same time. And from the knowledge contained in a dictionary, effectively all other learning can be developed with enough access to the right books. Imagine what historians would give just to have a thorough dictionary of certain dead and lost languages. ■ A good dictionary manages to avoid circular references while introducing background information of great value, like word origins, historical uses, and designated correct pronunciations. ■ The only real flaw to the dictionary is the inescapable fact that a person can't look for a word with certainty without knowing how it is spelled, though the navigational clues within the dictionary can help. ■ The other thing the dictionary offers is serendipity. Words being listed alphabetically don't necessarily have anything to do with one another, but an adjacent word to the one the reader is searching may, in fact, open up a brand-new door to something entirely worth knowing. That may not always be the case, but there is a certain joy to be found in encountering something new and satisfying. ■ Tools like dictionaries are indispensable, even when they seem to be out of favor. We shouldn't assume that schoolkids are learning how to use the paper dictionary, when spell check and online dictionaries are readily available on their school-issued tablets and laptops. ■ But the habits and practices of their use need to be handed down, especially when companies as reputable as Microsoft are turning over their grammar checks to artificial intelligence while others, like Grammarly, are touting their tools to take over writing altogether. We are sailing mostly unwittingly into dangerous waters, and history is witness that enough other arts have been lost to time. Save the language and make a child look up what Webster's has to say.
A shipbuilding revival at great cost
South Korea has reportedly committed to a $150 billion "investment" in American shipbuilding capacity, using the know-how of its strong existing shipbuilding industry. The country is trying to win favor with the White House in an attempt to avoid getting hit with high and capricious tariff rates. Supposedly, the President still intends to hit the country with a 15% import tax, which seems imprudent for a country that is a good ally and a useful trading partner in a strategic geopolitical location.
Science has been pretty convinced that there's a bunch of matter in the Universe that we haven't been able to locate. A research project by Caltech and Harvard found it, and "revealed that 76 percent of the universe's normal matter lies in the space between galaxies, also known as the intergalactic medium. About 15 percent resides in galaxy halos, and the remainder is concentrated within galaxies -- in stars or in cold galactic gas."
"Sloppers" will come to regret outsourcing their thoughts
It has been suggested that "power users" of chatbots like ChatGPT should be called "sloppers", since they open themselves up to mentally swallowing the vast amounts of "AI slop" being produced by those tools. It's a very good word.
During the peak of network television dominance -- just before cable came along to ensure that there would always be at least 57 channels and nothing on -- individual scripts may not have been entirely predictable, but there was never much doubt about the direction that any individual episode might take. Problems would be solved, crises would be overcome, bad guys would be caught. The only reason it took so many months to figure out who shot J.R. Ewing was that real-world people were arguing over money. Scripts usually came across with the subtlety of an after-school special. ■ Fast-forward to the present, and it's no longer possible even to precisely quantify the number of channels available to the television viewer. Streaming especially has obliterated the old strategies. That chaos has resulted in much the opposite problem: Scripts are being written with binge-watching in mind and the specter of the second screen ever present. ■ In the realm of prestige television, an overcorrection can be seen in scripts becoming increasingly inferential -- sequential episodes skipping vital plot points in between that only make sense once the viewer attends to the context clues. "Arrested Development" did it for fun, with false promises at the end of each episode about what would happen "On the next 'Arrested Development'". ■ But serious television often now omits a lot. And though it can be hard to look away because the conflicts are so compelling, the shots so beautiful, and the actors so skilled, there's also something jarring about how screenwriting seems to have invited itself to skip a lot of details along the way to dropping heavy dramatic changes at the end of a season. Thus, viewers can find themselves drawn in by the screen presence of gifted actors on a show like "The Bear" but still reaching the end of a season and wondering why they hadn't been told any of the secrets sometime sooner. ■ Human storytelling doesn't always have to keep an explicit lesson in mind, but there's at least a little danger in surrendering so much of a story's energy to atmospherics, no matter how good they are. It's not that every scene needs to be worthy of a "The More You Know" comet trail, but audiences do deserve to know a little more about themselves at the end of a commitment to a program. High-prestige shows like "Mad Men", "Game of Thrones", and "The Sopranos" all managed to frustrate many of their fans with terminal ambiguity. Some people like to have things to wonder about after a show has finished its run, but few shows have the honesty to admit that, like "Curb Your Enthusiasm", their goal is to leave with "no lessons learned".
