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The Hugos! and Death

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It’s Hugo nomination season again. That’s fairly coincidental to my perusing one of my more frequently-consulted Wikipedia pages: The Hugo Award for Best Novel. The reason I come back to this page again and again is that one of my long-term reading projects is to read all the best novel winners of the last 61 (and counting) years, as well as any notable books that were nominated as well.

I’ve read none of the handful of winners (and just one 1959 nominee) from the first decade. Half of the winners from the ’60s and ’70s (plus another half-dozen that were nominated). Only a handful of winners and nominees from the ’80s and ’90s. But almost every winner since 2000, and as many nominees.

It’s not an overwhelming task. The trick is to grab a book and read, and not let it go into a pile that I won’t touch in awhile. I’ll have to be equally careful for epubs, now that I’m making regular use of my new reader (a basic Kobo, if you’re wondering). It’s easy to quickly thrown a dozen digital books on there. Humble Bundles and all that. How long will it take to read them all, or will I?

This is the great tragedy of the reader who is also an existentialist: knowing you will never manage to read all those books. Sometimes counting the remaining years of my life in the books I could optimally read brings home the frailty of human life in a more immediate way than anything else.

This took a turn for the morbid, didn’t it?

When Nerds Collide: Grammatical and Mathematical Geekery

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I stumbled upon this exchange while double-checking something on hyphen use. The full debate is here:

@whoa: It is relevant in that it was an example of where dozen isn’t really considered a number: All of math. 2 * 6 = 12 When choosing to write it out, you would write “two times six equals twelve” not “two times six equals dozen.” You could say “two time six equals a dozen” but now you have an article in there. If you feel comfortable calling that a number, so be it. I was just pointing out that it may be misleading to consider dozen the same kind of number as twelve much like a six isn’t the same “kind” of “number” as six or 6. –  MrHen Jul 26 ’11 at 22:35
@mrhen, That’s preposterous. “Jimmy has a dozen eggs, he gives Sally half, how many does he have left?”. Answer: 12 * 1/2 = 6. According to your logic, ‘half’ wouldn’t be considered a number either? A dozen is a real number, even in Math… –  whoabackoff Jul 26 ’11 at 22:50
@whoa: I am simply trying to point out the difference between dozen and twelve with regards to their qualifications for the label “number”. There is a difference and just calling dozen a “number” may be misleading. And yes, it would be just as misleading to refer to “a half” as a number. Or “a whole” or “first”. Do they technically qualify as numbers? You tell me. My point is that even if they do, there is a difference between those and numbers like 9, 10, pi, i. –  MrHen Jul 26 ’11 at 23:02
@whoabackoff: So, according to your definition of number, pair times pair times few equals dozen? Nevermind that you are ignoring the fact that pair, few, dozen, score, hundred, gross, etc. are commonly used as units of measure. –  Patrick87 Jul 27 ’11 at 1:05
Did you read the Wikipedia article? Clearly I’m not the only person alive who thinks calling “dozen” a “dimensionless unit of measure” is acceptable. If you accept this Wikipedia page to be at all authoritative, I don’t see how you can come to any other conclusion than that you are incorrect in this matter. –  Patrick87 Jul 27 ’11 at 15:13