2003-03-07 13:34 (UTC)

The wind at night so softly is sighing

Swedish class last night coincided with the teacher's 60th birthday which derailed it somewhat and quite right too. Sadly, we did not drink ourselves into comas, but I did have plenty of opportunities to decline cake. I haven't given it up for "Lent" or anything; I'm just not a cake person.

When I got home there'd been flooding and the landlord was about in the basement and stuff, and when it was all patched up and he'd gone I noticed that my heating had joined in the rebellion. So I went to bed unwashed, the shame, the shame.

The brain measuring (PET is positrons! Actual anti-matter in people's heads! And another technique involves Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDS)! Absolutely marvellous.) colloquium is this afternoon and the way I feel right now I might just accept a complimentary glass of wine afterwards because dammit.

My hypersensitive European sense of distance is all excited anyway because I'm trecking right across the country tonight to the town they call London (it's over a hundred miles![1]) and staying there for the weekend and doing lots of exciting things.

(Tinka's remarks on the visual aspects of writing made me want to say calligraphy:writing::poetry:speech and to wonder why calligraphy was so disregarded as an artform in our culture. And now I have, hurrah.)

And a review in the current issue of Language says "[T]o call the basal ganglia 'our reptilian brain' [...] is as useful as calling the spinal cord 'our fish brain'", and I'm like, "Cool! We have a fish brain as well?". (And if I punctuate like a computer programmer, that's only to be expected. It's the rest of you that are doing it wrong.)

Until Monday, though, me and my fish brain are outta here. Vi ses!

[1] Although it may not be, I didn't check.

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2003-03-06 15:24 (UTC)

Positronic Brainpr0n!

Note: Diaryland is flaking at me / it don't hear a word I'm saying.
We apologise for such sparsage as this may be causing.

This guy is coming tomorrow to give a lecture on the use of maths to in spicy brain imaging. It's supposed to be pitched at an "introductory" level, which means I can reasonably expect to understand the first three minutes of it. (I suspect this of being a preview.)

In a previous life, I learned to use the word "tomography" in real sentences, and I know enough physics to say "positron" (the thrill never quite wears off, you know - it's an honest-to-goodness anti-particle!) but putting all that together with spicy brains, well gosh hoorah!

There are some top-quality perks in this job, that's for sure.

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2003-03-05 17:12

The Return of Royal Romance

While big sis is risking life and limb for her country, hem hem, Madeleine is sneaking off bunking off college and going skiing with her new boyfriend. Expressen has the scoop:

Prinsessan Madeleine och hennes nya pojkv�n Jonas Bergstr�m, 24, passade p� att shoppa - och k�pa Expressen - under sin hemliga k�rlekssemester i �re. De har bott i kungafamiljens stuga i Storlien. P� dagarna har de �kt skidor i �re. "Vi har haft det v�ldigt trevligt", s�ger prinsessan Madeleine till Expressen.

[Princess Madeleine and her new boyfried Jonas Bergstr�m, 24, took the chance to shop - and to buy Expressen - during their secret loveholiday in �re. They stayed in the royal family's cottage in Storlien. During the days they've been skiiing in �re. "We've had a lovely time," said princess Madeleine to Expressen]

I think that makes spring official, then.

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2003-03-05 10:02 (UTC)

memetics:genetics::astrology:astronomy

Mary Midgley reviews Daniel Dennet's new book Freedom Evolves in which he undertakes to restore legitimacy to the concept of free will within an evolutionary account of humanity. She approves, and who wouldn't? I'm an unreconstructed Cartesian dualist, though, so I don't care very much. On the other hand, he's still pushing memes (this is Midgely's account):

Memes are supposed to be a kind of parasitical quasi-organism that function as genes (or possibly as units) of culture, producing behaviour patterns by infesting people's minds just as biological parasites infest their bodies. These mythical entities were invented, somewhat casually, by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene as a supplement to his story of the causal supremacy of genes, and the current huge popularity of evolutionary thinking has caused the idea to catch on despite its wildness. It supplies people outside the physical sciences with something that looks to them like a scientific explanation of culture - "scientific" because it looks vaguely like genetics, and because it does not mention human thought and feeling.

Memes annoy Midgely because they undermine autonomy, but they annoy me because they're rubbish. It's intensely galling to see the kind of people who would reject Freud as "unscientific" on the grounds that his ideas are not empirically testable, and who tend to deny any legitimacy to any form of the social sciences suddenly start waving "memetics" around as if it actually meant something.

"Memetics" makes L�vi-Strauss's structural anthropology look like Newtonian physics by comparison. Hell, the rigour involved in formulating "memetics" makes Kierkegaard look like Bertrand Russell by comparison. This isn't swings and roundabouts, this is motes and beams, and if it establishes anything it's (paging Father Brown, paging Father Brown) just how gullible scepticism can make you.

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2003-03-04 14:52 (UTC)

Exhaustive English Ergativity Extravaganza!

First of all, The (Blackwell) Handbook of Linguistics is really very good. It's a modern successor to the Lyons's book I discussed a while back, and as such it's intended for the General Reader who wants more detail than popularisations manage about the current state of the art. I'm having large quantities of fun ploughing through it.

The chapter on typology by William Croft also sorted me out on the whole ergativity thing, hoorah. First, we divide verbs into two types, transitive verbs, which take a subject (denoted [S] below) and intransitive verbs, which have an agent (the do-er, denoted [A]) and a patient (the do-ee denoted [P]). E.g. (from Croft):

• The woman[S] doesn't run.
• The snake[A] bit the man[P].

So, in English (and Swedish and French and lots of other languages) the [A] and [S] nouns for these two types of sentences are treated identically as the grammatical subject, in contrast to the [P] noun, which is the object. This system of organisation is called the "transitive" or "nominative" basis. The surprising thing is that some languages do it a different way: they put [S] and [P] in the same grammatical category (the "absolutist" category) as the participant affected by the verb, to which [A] is opposed, if it occurs, as an "ergative" (i.e., causative) category.

Croft doesn't hesitate to file English under "nominative" languages, but he's provided enough information to go back and reopen the enquiry into what Halliday was on about in the Lyons's book. Let's annotate two of his sentences the same way:

• The ball[S] bounced.
• John[A] bounced the ball[P].

Now we can see that the verb bounce appears to have gone a bit ergative - the thing going boing switches from [S] in intransitive clauses to [P] in transitive clauses exactly as ergative languages do it - but the syntax don't seem to have been briefed and are still clinging on to the nominative framework. (This is even clearer in the comparison between "they marched" and "he marched them", where the pronoun the "absolutist" persons undergoing marchinghood switches into the object case as if it thought this was Latin or something.) In fact, English can sort of maybe mark the absolutist case - at least facetiously we can speak of the ball as the bouncee in both sentences, paralleling the form of employee. (I used do-er and do-ee above in this sense, of course.)

We conclude, then, that a bunch of English verbs can occur in transitive or intransitive form with a "absolutist" noun wedged into a "nominative" syntactic framework. This is counter-intuitive but really neat; it's exactly the sort of thing I like about linguistics.

But not everything in the garden is rosy. Here's Andrew Spencer in the morphology chapter of the Blackwell Handbook:

Most linguists would probably say that there are two distinct, though related, BREAK morphemes here:

• Tom broke the vase.
• The vase broke.

In many languages such usages are conveyed morphologically (...). Notice that the verb retains its purely morphological properties in both usages, so there is no conversion or affixed derivation in the usual sense here. Rather, we seem to have two closely related lexemes which share all the same word forms.

(My emphasis added.) Even without the self-parodic touch of the survey (apparently) by introspection ("Ockham-Shmockham, me and my mob of imaginary friends say they're differently identical, OK? ") this would be weird, don't you think? (Voice over: "Why take two verbs into the lexicon, when you can just ergatise and go?! Now with new transitising action and pro-vitamin E6!")

Anyway, I've decided: Spencer's hypothetical colleagues notwithstanding, make mine ergative!

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2003-03-04 09:31 (UTC)

March Map Madness

In the non-linear dynamics seminar yesterday the boss said that the map "x goes to mu + x-squared" began to be investigated intensively in the late 70's, and by the early 90's it had pretty much been completely figured out.

Way to go, persons!

Update: Simon Lintott is one of the persons who has worked on this map! Small world, eh?

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2003-03-03 12:00 (UTC)

Princess on parade

We like a prinsess in uniform here at the bladet, so we rejoice at the start of Kronprinsess Vickan's stint of National Service.

Under tre veckor ska hon tillsammans med ytterligare 50 personer l�ra sig putsa k�ngor, kl� sig i uniformsmodell 90 och g�ra patron ur p� en automatkarbin 5.

[For three weeks will she together with 50 other people learn to clean boots, dress in uniformsmodell 90 [they'll all be wearing it next year - des] and load cartridges in automatkarbin 5.]

More on this important issue over at Aftenposten, if you prefer Norwegish.

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2003-03-03 12:46

L is for Linkage

Linux

[Update: Thorvald has corrected my figures (thanks!) - it's worth half a billion UKP for Denmark to abandon Microsoft.]

Me and my penguin gonna sweep your butterfly good,
Yeah, me and my penguin gonna sweep that butterfly good,
Gonna sweep that butterfly out of this neighbourhood.
"Butterfly Blues", Blind Spacefish Slim

Aftonbladet on the growth of Linux as an alternative to Microsoft. The Swedish tax office is has itchy feet, and "Danmark r�knar med att kunna spara fem milljarder p� att �vrege Microsoft" (Denmark calculates it could save five million [Swedish Kronor, presumably, so half a million billion UKP) by escaping Microsoft.)

Aff�rstidningen Business Week visar i en bred genomg�ng hur Linux, med en pingvin som symbol, �r p� v�g att sopa till Microsofts f�rgglada fj�ril.

Business newspaper Business Week shows in a broad overview how Linux, with a penguin as mascot, is on the way to sweeping Microsoft's gaily-coloured butterfly.

The article is illustrated with a big picture of Tux, the Linux mascot, hoorah. As for the butterfly, I am suspecting an idiom.

Lem

Stanislaw Lem grumps about kids science fiction today, on the occasion of a new film version of his classic novel Solaris because that Tarkovsky loser completely stuffed up the "Last Tango in Paris in space" vibe that it so clearly needs, ahem:

Jag har inte sett filmen och inte l�st manuskriptet. Det enda jag med s�kerhet kan s�ga �r att boken inte handlar om erotiska problem i v�rldsrymden, fnyser Stanislaw Lem. Hade jag velat skriva en k�rlekshistoria hade jag knappast kallat den Solaris.

[I haven't seen the film or read the script. The one thing I can say for certain is that the book wasn't about erotic problems in space, snorts Stanislaw Lem. Had I wanted to write a love story I would hardly have called it Solaris.]

Oh, and Star Trek? Utter pants! (You did know that, didn't you, Varied Reader? Please say you did.)

- Verklighetsflykt, fr�ser han och d�mer ut allt vad Star Trek och moderna rymdsagor heter. Anv�ndbart �r det p� sin h�jd som ett slags s�mnmedel.

[- Escapism, he hisses and condemns Star Trek and all modern sorts of space stories. At most they can serve as a kind of sleeping medicine.]

[via Gustav]

Letters

The Swedish post office is the world's best if you want to send letters within Sweden. Or something. The article headline "men bara i Sverige" (but only in Sweden) hints that it isn't a secret that they are ridiculously bad at sending things to people who have made the foolish error of living elsewhere than Sweden glorious Sweden, but the article doesn't explore that further.

Ladies

We don't get a lot of hits here from seekers after Rudenesses - this is a familybladet and we are careful of our languages - but we must salute the searcher who read down to the low three-hundreds of the Google results for "quite naked ladies", and stopped off here.

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