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2004-06-11 16:31
Borrowed from
Joe Marshall
Here's an anecdote I heard once about Minsky. He was showing a
student how to use ITS to write a program. ITS was an unusual
operating system in that the `shell' was the DDT debugger. You ran
programs by loading them into memory and jumping to the entry point.
But you can also just start writing assembly code directly into memory
from the DDT prompt. Minsky started with the null program.
Obviously, it needs an entry point, so he defined a label for that.
He then told the debugger to jump to that label. This immediately
raised an error of there being no code at the jump target. So he
wrote a few lines of code and restarted the jump instruction. This
time it succeeded and the first few instructions were executed. When
the debugger again halted, he looked at the register contents and
wrote a few more lines. Again proceeding from where he left off he
watched the program run the few more instructions. He developed the
entire program by `debugging' the null program.
After all, not being your program is a bug, isn't it?
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2004-06-11 14:05
Come on you
gul-och-bl�a!
K�p v�ra exklusiv framtagna supporterkl�der inf�r fotbolls-EM!
Buy our exklusiv forward-taken supporterclothes ahead of foopball's
European Championship!
I tell you what, I wouldn't mind some French kit just now. This is
not at all unpatriotique - it's just that I use up all my sporting
patriotisme on criquette and have none left over for foopball.
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2004-06-11 samwidge (utc+1)
There will be no advanced Swedish class next year - the funding persons have rejigged enhanced the hostility of their criteria, because this is what they do.
Going to class doesn't actually improve my Swedish, of course, but it provides a platform whereby if I do some work outside class I do get better.
Sigh...
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2004-06-11 10:06
It wasn't just Yoorpean elections yesterday; in many places (but not
here) it was locals too
The turnout across England and Wales is running at 40%, up an average
of 9% on last year - an increase not confined to the four regions
piloting all-postal ballots.
Zerothly, if 40% holds in Yoorpean-only elections, that'll be a lot.
There was a lot of talk about a record slump in turn-out, beforehand,
which would have done nothing for the European parliament's perceived
legitimacy in its struggle against the Forces of Darkness ("Council of
Ministers").
Labour is inevitably having a 'mare, as persons decide that the
election they would rather be having is one involving Mr Blair, whose
name is mud at the moment, and that there's no reason to acknowledge
the fact that this isn't one. (Whereupon it is. The Will to
Democracy is performative!)
I think local government would almost certainly do a better job if
persons were elected or otherwise on the basis of their merits for
local government, but some days I even think general elections are
about electing members of parliament rather than a president, so I can
clearly be ignored as a crackpot.
[Permalink]
2004-06-10 15:57
(It's just too damned hot, BTW.)
There is, apparently, a strong cross-language correlation in which kinds of speech sounds
babies learn to identify first. This had led some to propose a
"universal hierarchy" of phonological features, preferably hard-coded as part of our
innate "Universal Grammar".
However, the bare existence of strong typological tendencies suggests
that the universal hierarchy might be strongly grounded in acoustic
properties of speech sounds.
Sharon Peperkamp, "Phonetic Diversity: Recent Attainments and New
Challenges", in Language and Speech v. 46, pp. 87-115 (2004)
No, d'you think? This is, of course, tossed in as an aside, and not
followed up.
It turns out that the bizarre situation whereby theoretical
phonologistes don't talk to the speech recognition people isn't the
full story: neither of them have much of anything to do with
the phonological acquisition people.
It used to be that phonologistes would argue a lot about the
ontological status of phonemes in a pointless and largely incompetent
recapitulation of the idealiste vs. realiste debate from
metaphysics. Bad enough, perhaps, but way ahead of the current state
of affairs.
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2004-06-10 samwidge (utc+1)
�1. Swift, like a glacier!
Prinsesse M�rtha, Ari Behn og Maud Angelica flytter til New York til
h�sten. P� samme tid skal deres luksusvilla i Lommedalen gjennom
omfattende utbyggingsarbeider.
Prinsess M�rtha [Louise], her husband and their daughter are moving to
New York in the autumn. At the same time their luxury villa in
Pocketvalley will undergo comprehensive outbuildingworks.
How long have we been hearing that they're moving to New York? And they
haven't even managed to find a flat there yet!
�2. Orality, French-style
Oral folk prefer, especially in formal discourse, not the soldier but
the brave soldier; not the prinsess, but the beautiful prinsess; not
the oak but the sturdy oak.
Ong, Orality and Literacy p.38
We are so very oral! But meeja meeja on the wall, pray tell,
which is the beautifullest prinsess of them all?
�Mary er den SMUKKESTE prinsesse�, fastslog det franske blad Point de
Vue i g�r. Det har 53 procent af bladets l�sere bestemt.
"Knudella is the beautifullest prinsess" Frenchy-French prinsessbladet
Point de Vue established yesterday. Thus have 53 percent of the bladets readers
decided.
A clear majority! An elegant synthesis of best practices from the
democratic and monarchical traditions, it is not to be doubted.
�3. On the ontological status of the phoneme
Le phon�me n'est ni identique au son, ni ext�rieur au son, mais
n�cessairement pr�sent dans le son, il lui demeure inh�rent et
superpos� : c'est l'invariant dans les variations.
The phoneme is neither identical to the sound nor exterior to it;
while necessarily present in the sound it remains inherent to and
superposed on it: it is the invariant in the variations.
Jakobson, Six le�ons sur le son et le sens
Jakobson is deliberately riffing on Husserl's method of eidetic
reduction, and don't think he isn't.
[Permalink]
2004-06-10 10:01
Is there a substratum on which mathematics rests? Is logic the
foundation of mathematics? In my view mathematical logic is simply
part of mathematics. Russell's calculus is not fundamental, it is
just another calculus. There is nothing wrong with a science before
its foundations are laid.
"Ludic" Ludwig Wittgenstein, lecturing on the foundations of
mathematics, quoted in Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius p. 328
Logiciste philosophy (see Brian
Weatherson's blog for some examples) is bad applied maths. It is
maths, because logic is just another calculus. It is applied, because
the maths is being used to model phenomena such as knowledge or
whatever that are not themselves intrinsically mathematical.
It is bad because nobody actually believes in the kind of fastidious
homuncular logician that these models postulate, so that the models
are essentially bad toy problems. Toy problems are not intrinsically
bad: they can be very helpful if conditions are met which in
cardinality are such as to sustain a bijection with the set containing
the empty set and the set containing the empty set (2):
- They are tractable; and
- Consensus can be established that they illustrate important
features of the real problem.
It is the latter that goes wrong with logiciste accounts.
But I am no mystic; I do not believe consciousness is inherently too
weird for our tiny minds to grasp; I do not even think applied maths
is the wrong approach!
But we must attack these problems with good applied maths,
rather than bad, by which I mean with computers. That the logicistes
weaseled out of any blame for the failure of old skool AI (which was
entirely their fault) and managed to pin the blame on Lisp, of all
things, is one of the great scandals of recent intellectual history.
Lots of AI work is wildly wrong, for sure. But its wrong because
nobody knows how to do it right, and that's certainly to be preferred
over the logicistes fetishization of their peculiar kind of
wrongness.
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2004-06-09 devout (utc+1)
(Apparently it is different in other parts of 'Wegia, so I'll do a proper
public disinformation post.)
Smultron is really the ancient Norse giant robot god of strawberries
and lock-picking. He is the chief of gods; his wife Hjortron is the
godess of fertility, cloudberries and sn�kaos.
The covert worship of Smultron continues in Sweden, where the old
pagan ways never really died out, and even today ett
smultronst�lle is a secret
personal shrine for seeking the blessings that only Smultron can
confer:
SMULTRONST�LLE
One of my favourite Swedish words; literally, it means
"wild-strawberry place". It can mean anywhere special, attractive or
important to you personally. It can be rural or urban, natural or
man-made, real or virtual. Mine is my own garden.
("Smultronst�lle" means "wild-strawberry place" in much the same way
that Easter eggs are really about the Baby Jesus, of course. But it
keeps the Christians quiet.)
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2004-06-09 samwidge (utc+1)
Bristle, where I live, has recently had a free daily newspaper called
Metro launch, in the wake of lots of other cities. Sadly,
though, Bristle essentially doesn't have a public transport
infrastructure, which clobbers most of the usual distribution channels
for such a something.
In what looks to me like desperation (but I am by no means a
marketroid) they have instead resorted to having persons give it away
to pedestrians on busy street corners near work (among, presumably,
other places). There was an unusually pushy such person trying to
thrust it at me today, but I wasn't having it. The paper may be free
but my time isn't, and in any case the InterWebNet brings me Aftonbladet.
And today Carl Hamilton - for it is he! - 's column is entitled
"Feminismen drivs av marxistisk klasskamp" ("Feminism is driven by the
Marxist class struggle"). Compete with that, so-called "Metro", if
you can! My demands are, in the nature of their plurality, bifurcated
(2):
- At least one column a week should name-drop Marx approvingly; and
- the whole paper should be in Swedish. Nice easy Swedish, not that la-di-dah DN malarkey.
Then - and only then - we will talk. About the quantity of
prinsessor coverage, mostly, but a dialogue is a dialogue, after all.
[Permalink]
2004-06-09 morning (utc+1)
Fruit, meet
Norway. Norway, meet fruit:
B�rene er dyrket i plasttunneler, og det gir en rekordtidlig
sesongstart for norske jordb�rdyrkere.
The berries are grown in plastic tunnels, and this gives a recordearly
seasonstart for Norwegish strawberrygrowers.
At a mere 165 NOK (13.40 GBP) per Kg, at that. You can get smelly old
imported Belgian strawberries at 30 NOK (2.43596 GBP) a kilo, though.
UK supermarket Tesco has "Class 1"
strawberries of undisclosed nationality at 1.69 GBP for 454 g.
We note thingage to the enumerability of twicehood (2):
- Strawberries are cheaper in Norway than the UK
- Pre-packed strawberries in the UK are sold in stupid measures
By EU law (hoorah!) loose fruit 'n' veg have to be priced in sensible
("metric") units. By age-old custom the UK's shopping classes are
doing their level best to have none of it, and ancient traditions
straggle on in the pre-packed section. (Milk, like beer, comes mostly
in multiples of 568 ml. So far as I know milk, unlike beer, is not
generally consumed in 568 ml units and has correspondingly no excuse
at all.)
[Permalink]
2004-06-08 hot (utc+1)
Om du reser till landet i norr,
d�r vinden viner i skogarna,
ta d� med dig en h�lsning till en som bor d�r.
Till henne som en g�ng �lskade mig.
Om du reser genom sn�stormarna,
n�r �lvarna fryser och vintern blir h�rd,
se d� till att hon har en p�ls om sin rygg
att v�rma och skydda om k�lden blir sv�r.
"Flickan fr�n landet i norr", Bj�rn Afzelius's version of Dylan's
Girl of the
North Country.
If you are going where the snowflakes storm, where rivers
freeze and summer ends, can I come?
The UK is experiencing its warmest day of 2004 so far and temperatures
are expected to go as high as 32�C in some parts of the country.
Sigh.
[Permalink]
2004-06-08 fika (utc+1)
�1. Vickan
invites!
Sedan flaggan hissats klockan �tta h�lsade kronprinsessan Victoria p�
f�rmiddagen turister och bes�kare v�lkomna till �ppet hus p�
Stockholms slott med anledning av nationaldagen.
After the flag was raised at eight o'clock kronprinsess Victoriea
greeted touristes and visitors at an open house Stockholm castle in
connection with the nationalday.
Sweden's nationalday is notoriously understated, although not so much
(it is occasionally snarked) out of modesty as an unwillingness to add
to the woes of those unfortunate enough to have been born elsewhere.
�2. Mette-Marit
stays mum!
Kronprinsesse Mette-Marit reiser til Trondheim i morgen i
forbindelse med �rets TV-aksjon. Hva hun skal gj�re, er hemmelig.
Kronprinsess Mette-Marit is off to Trondheim tomorrow in connection
with this year's TV-action. What she'll be doing is secret.
Reading between the lines, this looks to be a charity telethon, but I
am reading between the lines in Norwegish and this is prone to error.
�3 Knudella
comes back!
(It is very kronprinsess, this edition, isn't it?)
Frederik og Mary er igen hjemme efter en sp�ndende bryllupsrejse, der
har varet i 24 dage. Mary, der plejer at v�re meget hvid i huden, har
tydeligvis f�et farve.
Kronprinsfred and Knudella are home again after an exciting
weddingtrip where they have been for 24 days. Knudella, which nursed
to be very white in the head, has currently got some colour.
Good grief. A couple of months ago she was a Strayan citizen - and
presumably a devout slip slop
slapper - and she's already forgotten the basics of skin
cancer prevention:
Australia's sunny climate makes for a great vacation weather but
sunburn is best avoided. Wear a shady hat and cover up exposed skin
with long sleeves or strong sunscreen. Wear factor 15+ and try to
avoid exposure during the hottest part of the day - from 10am to 3pm.
The same goes for Africa, I should think. And you would think a
prinsess of all persons would know a thing or two about wearing a hat!
[Permalink]
2004-06-08 morning (utc+1)
�1. Triumph is
a temporary condition, of course
Those attending yesterday's [D-Day anniversary] celebrations,
Liberation argues, were not celebrating the victory of a group of
nations over another but rather "the triumph of a vision of the world
and of mankind based on liberty, human rights and the rule of law".
�2. Kurdish TV,
now with subtracted hypotheticality
The Turkish state broadcasting company, Turkish Radio and Television,
says it will begin broadcasting programmes in the Kurdish language
next week.
Turkey passed legislation two years ago clearing the way for
broadcasts in Kurdish as part of a reform package.
Until now, however, no major TV or radio channel had begun any.
�3. The EU parliament is your friend
Last September MEPs voted on a proposal to bring European patent law
up to date by letting inventors include computer-based aspects of
their inventions.
But before they passed the proposed directive on "the patentability of
computer-implemented inventions", they made a number of changes to it.
The most important was that their version made it clear that
"inventions involving computer programs which implement business,
mathematical or other methods and do not produce any technical effects
beyond the normal physical interactions between a program and the
computer, network or other programmable apparatus in which it is run
shall not be patentable".
This is good.
The European Parliament does not have the power of a national
parliament like our own at Westminster, so the proposal then had to be
approved by the Council of Ministers, made up of politicians from the
EU member states.
Before they could get to it, though, it was overhauled by a working
party, which removed almost every change the parliament had made.
This is bad. Worse still, the screwed-over version is the one the
Council of Ministers endorsed. It would be nice, though on previous
form unreasonable, to think that the Council of Ministers has an
agenda beyond screwing over the public in favour of vested interests -
the things to bear in mind here are two (2) in number*:
- The EU parliament tried to do the decent thing;
- It failed.
Your MEP is (in principle) accountable to the enfranchised punters.
The Council of Ministers, as I have mentioned before, is made up of
ministers from national governments, and they have left no opportunity
unseized to demonstrate who much they value your opinions and those of
your elected representatives.
The process isn't over, and Parliament can still throw the proposal
out. I shall be encourageing my MEP to do just that - if you also have
one, you can play too.
* Also three (3) in colour, and a whopping burnt sierra in aftertaste!
�3. EU-election countdown
Aftonbladet has extensive
coverage. National parties serve as proxies for EU
parliamentary groupings their party
by party roundup is of negligible use outside Sweden, though.
[Permalink]
2004-06-07 post-samwidge (utc+1)
Vikings (singing): Spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!
Waitress: ...or Lobster Thermidor � Crevette with a mornay sauce
served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished
with truffle pat�, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.
Wife: Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much
spam in it.
Wife: I don't want ANY spam!
Man: Why can't she have egg bacon spam and sausage?
Wife: THAT'S got spam in it!
Man: Hasn't got as much spam in it as spam egg sausage and spam, has it?
Wordsworth, Wordsworth, de Man, Butler and Wordsworth hasn't got
that much Wordsworth in it, isn't it?
[Marilyn] Butler's criticism, on the other hand, cannot be defended
against such a charge at a theoretical level, though in practice-which
is what is important-it privileges the complex historical engagements
of specifically 'literary' writing. Nevertheless, it is Butler's, not
Levinson's, criticism that justifies expansion of the canon, if not a
wholly anti-canonical program. It is not unreasonable, indeed, to
consider Butler the presiding genius of the massive reprint and
recovery operation set in motion in the last two decades.
Being other than in the best of all possible moods, my rival theory of
the expanded or exploded canon purveyed by litt�raturistes in the
USian Academy is that it suits very well the needs of the current
overproduction of PhDs in the alleged humanities, and the associated
print-capitalisme ventures.
Cherchez le dosh, mon pote as K. Marx (no relation) once
pithily put it.
Even more annoyingly, my university's alleged library has an
assortment of unhelpfully ancient editions of Biographia
Litteraria, and I still can't find my Kennedy's Shorter Latin
Primer (and I've never owned a Latin dictionary - it should tell
you everything you need to know about school Latin that such a thing
was not considered necessary or appropriate for it) so I'm going to have to splash the readies on the Princeton UP edition (as recommended by Jonathan K Cohen, tack).
At least England (not En-ger-lund, which is a foopball team) won at
the cricket, with arguably the decisive knock coming from a lad of
positively Foucauldian
post-nationaliste
identity:
When Geraint Jones kissed the three lions on his helmet with excited
passion on reaching his century, photographed by Andrew Strauss and
cheered on by his exuberant fellows, he might have been trying to come
to terms with a particularly tricky identity crisis.
Born on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea of Welsh parents, and
raised and educated in Toowoomba, an outback town in Queensland, this
is no ordinary cricketer.
"I feel strongly Welsh more than anything," he says. "But there is a
strong mix in between."
Glamorgan, one of the first class counties in the English cricket
set-up, is in Wales, but by long-standing tradition Welsh cricketers
are eligible to play for England - apart from Jones the Wicket (as
above) and Jones the Bowl (a regular, but injured for this Test), the
most recent was the Welsh-speaking spin bowler Robert Croft, who
insisted that the England team was effectively cricket's equivalent of
the British Lions (a combined Great Britain side which plays some
rugby fixtures), to the horror of the sort of persons who are
horrified by this sort of thing. (Thankfully, this is very few
persons and they are long since social lepers.)
The question for me at the moment, of course, is which foopball team
to support for Euro 2004. Since the mighty red devils of South Korea
aren't playing (Korea is apparently not in Yoorp) I think I might
start out with Latvia, because I like Latvia, and switch to France
when Latvia go out. But for some reason I can only find En-ger-lund
supporters' kits in the shops.
[Permalink]
2004-06-07 samwidge (utc+1)
Jonathan Heawood writes, hos Grauniad:
According to new research commissioned by Penguin Books, men who are
seen reading a book are more attractive to the opposite sex, and I was
keen to see whether this was true in practice.
Would this "research" be by "psychologists" by any chance? Perhaps
one of the fine research establishments that advises scholarly
periodicals such as The Express on "What your choice of tie
says about you!"?
If men are befuddled by fiction, they are hungry for factual writing.
In the UK, 60 per cent of men read non-fiction, compared to only 52
per cent of women.
60 per cent to 52 per cent! This is indeed a gap that is like unto, or
resembling, a ravine or canyon in its width and and its depth!
Men respond to books like Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero because 'they
reflect the culture of men down the pub telling stories about the time
they did something very stupid and could quite easily have lost their
lives. Fiction is far too obviously made up'.
It goes without saying, or at least is not said, that all men who read
non-fiction read non-fiction about soljers, but even if the second
sentence is only structurally sequiturial it rings true for me:
Fiction is far too obviously made up.
[Permalink]
2004-06-07 10:40
It was all very lovely, but further reflections will have to wait to
see if I can come up with a second stanza; for now I will confine
myself to the observation that the cricket coverage on Radio 4
long-wave on Sunday morning was delayed by coverage of the queen
singing songs to dead persons.
And my head is still not working.
[Permalink]
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