Baaaa

[hawkwing_lb]

Because I'm bored and lazy -

Three questions meme. Ask me three questions, any three questions. I'll answer. Then pass on the meme.

Comments

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Three questions? Um. Hm.

1. What's your favorite color? (we'll start with an standard Q, just to warm up).

2. If you were an animal, which species would you be?

3. How much land does a person need?

:-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

1. Black.

2. I am an animal. Species homo sapiens.

But tortoises would be kind of cool. :)

3. Three feet across and six feet down. :)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Ooh, snarky! We could debate whether black is a color (when it's usually considered either the absence of color (light) or the presence of color (pigments)...) and then we could debate the human animal versus animal issue.

Read Tolstoy, have you? ;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

My theorem on black as a colour:

Colour is light.

Black is the absence of light.

The absence of light is still perceived by the eye.

Hence, the absence of colour is still a colour.

...Well, sartorially speaking, anyway. :)

And nope, I haven't read Tolstoy. What does Leo have to do with this, anyway? :)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Which is why I specifically said light or pigments, as the pigmented black is the presence of multiple colors, yet the light black is the absence of color. OK, colour. And, to be technical, the absence of light isn't perceived by the eye. The eye perceives three colors (colours) in the normal human being: red, yellow-green, and blue; thus the term trichromacy.

The colour-blind human perceives two colors; either red, green, or blue is missing.

Rods perceive motion and light versus dark.

Even more truthfully, the eye doesn't perceive; it instead generates signals that are sent to the brain which does the perceiving. You actually see with your brain and not your eyes. :-P

Why, yes, I do eye research. I just gave a talk on eye anatomy to the technicians, and learned a few things myself, on colour vision. In fact, I learned that I am a tritanomaly -- I have trouble perceiving "blue/yellow". My father is probably a pure tritanope, being blue-green colour-blind.

Neat stuff.

Oh, Tolstoy -- that was the title of a story he wrote. "How much land does a man need?" Once upon a time I read his stuff and other Russian novelists. Mainly because I was a masochist of the highest degree. Now I am older, wiser, and infinitely more cynical. Leo was a character, though, wasn't he? Him and his wife, writing in their diaries about how the other person was so awful, and then each snooping in the other's diary. ;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Fine, fine. You win on eyes, completely, utterly, totally.

... Black is still my favourite colour. :)

I don't know jack about the Russian literary greats, but really, the answer to that question is an obvious one: enough land to be buried in. You're dead a lot longer than you're alive, after all. :)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I'll admit a fondness for black clothing myself. ;-) My school colours were black and grey, perfect for budding morticians. At least my college colours are blue and gold, much brighter.

And if I recall correctly, that's the same answer Tolstoy came up with in his essay. ;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. You didn't have a uniform, I hope?

(Green for me. Though sports colours were green and red.)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

No, no uniforms, just a dress code that's oddly difficult to shake off. It took a long time before I could wear denim in public. ;-) I never could bring myself to wear gym clothes to classes (what we call sweatpants/sweatshirt) in college. Just couldn't do it. :-D

I think they sneakily changed the school colors, because I don't see any references to black and grey anymore. Drat them! If it was good enough for nearly a 100 years of students, it's good enough for them now!

:-')

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

dress code that's oddly difficult to shake off

I suspect there's a reason they call them 'formative years'. :)

I think they sneakily changed the school colors.

Nobody has any sense of history anymore. (says the girl who had an indoctrination in "Four hundred years of Mary Ward! Two hundred years! Of the Loreto tradition!" for six years. The stuff that sticks with us, hey? :))

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. Although Kipling did have the right idea (on the first six years), the indoctrination during those years is rather thorough. They did teach us how to write well, and to think critically, as well as leave some of us with an odd fondness for black and grey.

I'll tell ya, I don't think they make those kids work hard enough any more. Why, when I was in school, we had to write essays every Monday afternoon, and they had to be grammatically correct as well as full of critical thinking, plus correctly spelled. [I misspelled two words out of four years of weekly essays. I didn't get "similar" in the 9th grade and then I missed "and" in my senior year. Yes. I misspelled "and".] Today's youth probably has all that stuff spell-checked before they even email it to the teacher. ;-)

[cristalia.livejournal.com]

1. What's your major? And why?

2. If you were a member of the Obliterati, a secret cabal devoted to breaking stuff, what five things would you break into powder?

3. Favourite time of year?

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

1. If you are asking the question I think you are asking, then technically speaking, I don't have one. This being one of the interesting ways Irish universities differ from their North American counterparts, and how TCD differs from the rest of its Irish counterparts. :)

I'm doing something the college calls a two subject moderatorship. Which means I'm studying both Ancient History and Archaeology (AHA) and Biblical and Theological Studies (BTS) on an equal time basis. And since I switched courses to get away from French literature, I'm doing my junior freshman year over again.

Why? Because when I did my Leaving Cert exams, I came up fifteen points short of the cut-off for either medieval or modern history. Doing the ancients was my second choice, and besides, the so-called 'Classical' world is just plain cool. And it makes sense to do it with Biblical Studies, since the regions are so inter-related.

And to top it off, the most interesting fieldwork gets to be done somewhere warm. Be a nice career, if I could wrangle myself a position that involved getting paid to go places in the Med. :)

2. Tricky question. Nuclear weapons, electronic voting machines, that really dreadful phallic symbol the Corpo set up on O'Connell Street (the million-euro waste-of-money Spire), the architectural horror that is Dublin's Central Bank building and, hmm, probably the next really ugly shopping centre or industrial park I come across.

Hey, I have to think big about these kind of things.

3. Not sure I have one anymore. It used to be late autumn and/or early spring, because of it being campaign season! in school hockey, but I haven't played over a year. Probably early spring, when the weather switches between frost and sunshine and rain and everything starts to smell all new and alive.

Yep, I think I like spring.