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2003-02-21 10:33 (UTC)
1.
In which I am reduced to prinsessfragments:
I slutet av januari ber�ttade Madeleine f�r Expressen att hon g�rna
ville flytta till en egen l�genhet, men att hennes mamma och pappa
sagt nej.
Nu kommer i st�llet Carl Philip att l�mna f�r�ldrahemmet.
[At the end of January Madeleine told Expressen that she wanted to
move out to her own flat, but her mummy and daddy (her daddy is the king!)
said no.
Now Carl Philip is leaving the family home instead.]
He was still living at home? Blimey.
2.
Everyone knows that an orange started its career as a
norange, of course, but I, at least, didn't know that a
newt was once an ewt.
3.
Britain's most cheerfully rabid prolesheet, The
Sun has produced a special
edition for the dubious benefit of French persons:
Les citoyens du Royaume-Uni estiment que M. Chirac, qui au Royaume-Uni
est surnomm� le "Ver", se pavane avec arrogance sur la sc�ne
internationale avec pour seul objectif de donner � son pays une
importance d�mesur�e par rapport � la r�alit�.
La v�rit� c'est que le monde entier, y compris la France, sait qu'il
faut r�gler le probl�me Saddam Hussein.
[British people think that M. Chirac, nicknamed "Worm" in Britain [oh,
no he isn't - des] is strutting about arrogantly on the international
scene with the sole purpose of making France look more important than
it is.
The truth is that the whole world, including France, knows that
something has to be done about Saddam Hussein.]
(They provide a translation of their own, apparently, but that isn't
it.) We're all for European understanding here at Desbladet, hence
the new reader-friendly InstaGlossing (well,that and someone asked).
4.
Via Bluejoh
comes this stirring call to action:
Flight has been mastered in a way not yet paralleled by the emergence
of machine intelligence. At one point Rick [a person - des] discussed
one of the significant developments in the desire to fly as being when
learned people started to confidently but usually disastrously, throw
themselves off buildings. The consensus at ES2000 [a collection, or
"group", of persons - des] was that within AI, we have not really got
to the stage where we are throwing ourselves off buildings.
I've already compared connectionist AI to gluing feathers to a box and
hoping it will fly, but there are also other approaches, of course. Some
groups have defined the problem to be a question of sustained altitude
above ground, and have thus built a succession of higher and higher
tree-houses ("While considerable research still needs to be done on
propulsion systems, we feel that this work provides a solid basis for
further development."), while another team has built a giant mechanical
egg ("Although the technology is well-established in secularised
celebrations of fertility rituals, initial experiments utilising
chocolate as a building material proved disappointing."), and is
actively investigating incubation strategies.
Call me simple-minded, but I still think the important breakthrough
with flight was when the Wright brothers built their own wind-tunnel
and did a great deal of fundamental research on the lift generated by
different aerofoil cross-sections. Then again, at
$OLD_COMPANY I once wrote a program (in Emacs Lisp, out of
sheer perversity) to calculate aerofoil geometries based on a
parameterized curve and a given cross-sectional profile, so you can
imagine. The aeroplane museum at Bod� is terrific, incidentally, if
you ever happen to be in the neighbourhood, ho ho.
[Permalink]
2003-02-20 12:54 (UTC)
The Eurovision season is upon us! I am giddy with delight and
rapture; all the more so since plucky little Iceland
is back in the fray. Savour the lo-fi mp3 magic of the selection
process from the windswept North Atlantic! Also some of the
unfeasibly large Swedish candidacy list, and exactly one Norwegian
song.
This time of joy is, however, tinged with sadness. Denmark scored
just seven (7) points (sept points!) last time, and is not a candidate
this year. I guess that kind of nixes doing the 'vision in a
Shoppingharbour establishment of beer-purveyance, from the point of
view of atmospherics, then.
[Permalink]
2003-02-20 09:55 (UTC)
1.
Maybe I'm knotty veneer
Hagger nigh telephime reely reel?
Hadder Y. Noah Fimere?
... Wunker nawlwye stell; yegger nawlwye snow
If you're reelor yerony dreaming;
Yellopoff the topoff your nirra stow
A new wafer the sander the screaming.
[From "Strine" - Afferbeck Lauder, 1966]
[via K in the guestbook]
2. The Lonely Planet
Australian Phrasebook which I now have, hurrah, has about 100
pages on various Aboriginal languages. It has good intentions, bless
it, and better yet it has references, since in 100 pages you can't do
much beyond factoidal snippetology when there are dozens of very
non-Indo-European languages to be discussed and the cultures that go
with them also as well. As a keen amateur snippetologist, I salute it.
3. In the not-(quite)-as-dull-as-it-is-worthy Language
Myths, Nicholas Evans has an essay "Aborigines speak a
primitive language" in which it turns out that they don't, surprise
surprise. Anyway, he recounts a helpful teacher of the Kayardild
language of Bentinck Island, Queensland permuting the words of
sentences to show that it doesn't matter.
And we can play too, hurrah, what fun! Using the words and
morphological decompositions
banga-ya ("turtle-obj."), dang-ka ("man-subj.") and
kurrija ("sees"), "[y]ou should be able to work out for
yourself six ways of saying 'the turtle sees the man". Assuming
there's only one noun class, anyway. Can I get a "thus" from the
audience here, on four; two; three; Thus:
Bangaa dangkaya kurrija
Bangaa kurrija dangkaya
Dangkaya bangaa kurrija
Dangkaya kurrija bangaa
Kurrija bangaa dangkaya
Kurrija dangkaya bangaa
You know me well enough by know, I'm sure, to know that I wouldn't
write out permutations by hand in a world where there are recursive
generators; how right you are:
from __future__ import generators
# requires python2.2 or later
def permute(l):
if not l: yield l
for i in range(len(l)):
first, rest = l[i:i+1], l[:i]+l[i+1:]
for p in perm(rest): yield first+p
for p in permute(["bangaya", "dangkaa", "kurrija"]):
print string.capitalize(" ".join(p)), "<br>"
(I don't care who uses Perl, it's smelly and horrid and
that's that.) I had been thinking about syntax, but I had forgotten
about languages which put all the heavily order-dependent stuff
in the morphology. Not any more, though. (I've got a Latin O-level,
for Heaven's sake, what was I thinking?)
[Permalink]
2003-02-20 09:56 (UTC)
The new Borders by the new Sainsbury's where Dingles used to be is now
unveiled, with yard after yard of shelving but no books.
My first thought was that I should like to have such shelving for my
own. I have apparently transcended book lust in favour of shelf
lust. "For when the books fit the shelving and the shelving fits the
books there is harmony in the library, although it is probably better
to err on the side of too much shelving if you have to choose."
My second thought was that they should have an opening party anyway
and have a flock of incredibly snooty waitroids swanning around with
trays of miniature, empty vol-au-vents.
My third thought was to tell you these things.
And having thought these thoughts, I did not see why I should think
anything else.
[Permalink]
2003-02-19 13:15 (UTC)
Not, sadly, the great lost Jane Austen prehistorico-metaphysical epic, but almost as
good, is this
interview
with Edward "Ned" Hall, ag�d anthropologist:
In other words, we use the reptilian model. This paradigm Trager and I
worked on, namely, the triune paradigm [formal, informal and technical
system] was very important. We have never been able to find a
biological basis for that paradigm but I had gone out to watch Paul
MacLean in his laboratories at the same time we were working this out.
When he started writing his articles, it became much more relevant.
Again, it was rooted in three different brains- the reptilian, the
limbic and the neo-cortex. The formal, the informal and the technical
fit perfectly. Constantly referring back to the physiological roots
has been important for me. That is from the theoretical point of view.
You're probably giggling helplessly at the idea of the importance of
"physiological roots" with no biological basis, I know. Not me -
overexposure to the apocalyptic scifi of J G Ballard's '60's novels
means that I'm putty in the hands of anyone - anyone - who
talks about reptilian brains. Luckily my brain insists on
substituting the expression "lizard brain" to thwart my many Google
searches on the subject, but
no
longer! (Of course that's kosher - it's got colour pictures and
everything. Or are you some kind of Old Science enemy of
righteousness?)
Anyway. He knew Sapir and (as mentioned) Trager of Smith-Trager, so
you should read it all, even if the interviewer is mostly content to
pass off agreeableness as insight. There's enough here to suggest Hall
is capable of an emphasis on the concrete and particular, without
losing sight of the big picture:
I guess that the only thing you can do, and advise your students to do
is to find out what people are doing. Give them some projects, little
exercises to practice. Some very practical questions about how you get
a clerks attention in the store. How do you talk to a waitress. These
are what I call situational dialogues. What do you need to know when
you get on the bus? The bus driver's in a hurry. But how do you learn
that. People are so acculturated here. They have literally learned the
entire behavioral language.
(More or less.) His main book, Silent
Language, appears to have had a readership in its day. We
shall see...
[link via Matt No-sword]
[Permalink]
2003-02-19 10:04 (UTC)
It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or
analysing. Husserl's first directive to phenomenology, in its early
stages, to be a "descriptive psychology" or to return to the "things
themselves", is from the start a foreswearing of science. I am not
the outcome or the meeting point of numerous causal agencies which
make up my bodily or psychological make-up. I cannot conceive of
myself as nothing but a bit of the world, a mere object of
biological, psychological or sociological investigation. I cannot
shut myself up within the realm of science. All my knowledge of the
world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular
point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the
symbols of science would be meaningless.
[...]
To return to things themselves is to return to that world which
precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in
relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and
derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the
country-side in which we have learned beforehand what a forest, a
prairie or a river is.
Merleau-Ponty The Phenomenology of Perception, p. ix
Out of context that gets closer to a kind of mystically antirational
solipsism than I would perhaps like - Husserl's original goal was to
provide a more secure foundation for science than the naive empiricism
then in fashion (unlike now, ho ho). For me, phenomenology represents
a way of rejecting the arid pointlessness of analytical philosophy,
which tries, with no obvious success, to ground an account of language
in logic, without resorting to nihilism, because I am not as young as
I used to be.
[Permalink]
2003-02-18 13:27 (UTC)
I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I
awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am
I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?
Chuang Tsu
Technically this is probably cheating because it's a derivative work,
but even so:
Grand Master Turing once dreamed that he was a machine. When he awoke
he exclaimed: "I don't know whether I am Turing dreaming that I am a
machine, or a machine dreaming that I am Turing!"
The Tao of Programming
More about the Turing test and associated debates than you ever wanted
to know is here.
[Permalink]
2003-02-18 13:14 (UTC)
Kasparov has never really recovered from the beating he took from Deep
Blue. He's now just drawn a match against Deep Junior, which runs on
stock hardware, and
says:
Yes, Deep Blue was 100 times faster, but so what? Sheer power means
little in chess because it is a mathematically near-infinite
game. The only way to measure the strength of a chess-playing
computer is to analyze its moves.
The expression "mathematically near-infinite" here means "I have no
idea what I am talking about", of course. For those of us whose
hardware budget is not mathematically near-infinite it is of
interest that the stock hardware that will barely run the next
generation of Microsoft Office is now the equal of the former (as in
"not any more") World Chess Champion.
Computer chess is not at all interesting cognitively, but Kasporov
doesn't know that:
What makes this new era so exciting is that there are many programs
using different techniques that produce distinct styles. Deep Junior
is as different from Deep Fritz as Kasparov is from Karpov. Chess
offers the unique opportunity to match human brains and machines. We
cannot do this with mathematics or literature; chess is a fascinating
cognitive crossroads.
C'mon, Gazza! It's alpha-beta tree pruning plus an evaluation
function and opening and end game books, everyone knows that. There's
some wiggle in the evaluation function, and that's your lot.
Now that beating puny humans is essentially a solved problem - and
make no mistake, it had to be done or They would still be giving it
the old "infinite majesty of the majestic and quintessentially
incomputable creativity faculty of the incomparably majestic human
spirit" rubbish and you know it - it might be interesting to go back
and look at chess the old way as a model problem for studying
cognition. How
do expert chess players learn to spot patterns (yes,
practise, ho ho) and how is their knowledge represented?
Won't happen, of course, but a man can dream, can't he?
[via
slashdot. Remember slashdot?]
[Permalink]
2003-02-18 09:25 (UTC)
I got so fed up with the semantics chapter in the Lyons book, which is
mired in the a bachelor is [+male] [+human] [-married]
[+taste for off-colour limericks] kind of drivel that was
apparently still hip in 1970 that I ran off to read about Montague
semantics, which uses the lambda calculus (or the lambada calculus, as
one insufficiently spell-checked table of contents of my acquaintance
has it). I like lambdas, those rugged and sure-footed beasts of
semantic burden. I like them in Lisp, I like them more than I should
in Python, where they're half-broken and increasingly deprecated, and
I like them in logic now, too.
And I want you to like them, too, so here's a formal semantics
course page - the
first three chapters are all lambda flavour, yum yum. Don't worry; I
don't really get the model theory stuff either - do what I do and just
hum along.
[Permalink]
2003-02-17 17:20 (UTC)
[Being a review of Mr. Descarte's Le discours de la m�thode]
We may zerothly note since that the book under review was written in
French - apparently to bypass the scholastic philosophers of the
Universities and allow a direct appeal to those (specifically
including women, whether queens of Sweden or otherwise, hoorah)
without the benefit of a classical education - its author's most
celebrated formula occurs in the from je pense, donc je suis.
While the wisdom of
avoiding
unnecessary Latin is scarcely to be doubted, we shall follow
established custom in speaking of the Cogito, which in any case
has a certain nescio quam that the French lacks.
Anyway, get a load of this, Early Modern sucker philosophes:
Et enfin, pour les mauvaises doctrines, je pensais d�j� conna�tre
assez qu'elles valaient pour n'�tre tromp� ni par less promesses d'un
alchemiste, ni par les pr�dictions d'un astrologue, ni par les
impostures d'un magicien, ni par les artifices ou la vanterie d'aucun
de ceux qui font profession de savoir plus qu'il ne savent.
If you said today that 17th century beliefs in alchemy and
what-have-you were just superstitious delusions and unscientific
foolishness, you'd be told in no uncertain terms that you were
hermeneutically challenged and quite right too. But that's Descartes
all over - he's no poster child for humility or tolerance, but he is
ridiculously modern, and the dissing is often very funny. And
besides, the
discours is from 1637, so you don't get to tell him about the
complexities of the 17th century life-world, not least because he's
been dead since then.
As the introduction points out, the sensible bits in Descartes
have been assimilated to such an extent that they are invisible to the
modern reader, while the less-successful bits are glaringly obvious.
This is completely unfair to his achievement, and you owe it to
yourself to get your hermeneutics fixed up better than that - the
Livre de Poche edition does a pretty good job of helping out with
that.
We particularly enjoyed the Insincerity Shuffle of the Earth II
creation story, in which the author postulates a parallel universe
developing (after an initial creation of disordered matter) according
only to certain laws of physics so as to be just uncannily like the
one we live in, only to invoke Ockham's lesser-known truncheon (don't
say anything that'll get you beaten up) and conclude that �il est bien
plus vraisemblable que d�s le commencement Dieu l'a rendu tel qu'il
devrait �tre.�
The Cogito itself appears here only in an abbreviated form, with some
of the twists of the full, Meditations version removed, but in
any case I read Descartes from a phenomenological rather than an
epistemological point of view, and I strongly recommend that approach
- the Cogito is first and foremost something one does and only
secondarily an argument, and if it's as much performative as
constative then it's none the worse for that.
From the point of view of a wannabe phenomenologist the biggest
deficiency of this book - which is really only a sketch of its authors
views - is the omission of the celebrated discussion of the piece of
wax. It's a serious omission; so much so that I have to read the
Meditations to get it or risk being laughed to scorn by
Parisian street urchins. (- Il dit qu'il est ph�nomenologue,
Jean-Claude, mais il ne sait m�me pas comment on fait l'analyse d'un
morceau de cire.
- Vraiment, Fran�ois. C'est � rire!)
[Permalink]
2003-02-17 12:20
Oxford
Companion to the Mind, Richard L. Gregory (Ed).
I found this in the Oxfam bookshop on Friday, and by now it has become
a canonical reference book. There's plenty of cross-sections through
spicy brains, of course, but there's a wide range of other things,
too. Sympathetic accounts of Husserl and Sartre; articles on Sufism
and Chinese philosophy; optical illusions and gestalt psychology; more.
If you're doing mind-brainology then you need to have this.
Aborder la linguistique, Dominique Maingueneau.
This is very short - 60-odd pages - and not really to my tastes. As
the author says:
L'�tude du langage, on l'a vu, est travers�e par un conflit permanent
entre ceux qui appr�hend le langage comme syst�me et ceux qui
l'apprehend comme discours.
He's a discourse analyst; I'm strictly structuralist - it was never
going to work. Plus he has an annoying habit of getting names and
book titles wrong. (English names and titles, usually. Hmm.)
[Permalink]
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