Continuing from yesterday's entry, I just noticed that assigning multiple categories in MovableType is possible. I hadn't read the manual or noticed the little link on the new entry page. Also [via Adam Curry's Weblog] I ran across a lovely article on What Makes a Weblog a Weblog? The author, David Winer, does a good job of describing weblogs, entries (or, posts), and even discusses Wikis and content managment systems. More later.
Dorothea over at Caveat Lector has an entry about phonaesthetics. It mainly has to do with the supposed "ugliness" of the neologism "blog." Discussions of phonaesthetics always remind me of de Saussure's principle: "Le lien unissant le signifiant au signifié est arbitraire, ou encore, puisque nous entendons par signe le total résultant de l'association d'un signfiant à une signfié, nous pouvons dire plus simplement: le signe linguistique est arbitraire." [See Cours de linguistique générale, Première partie, chapitre premier.] Yes, I have to agree with him that the linguistic sign is arbitrary, and any attempts to convince me otherwise are doomed to failure: pace Derrida's lovely book, Glas ('death knell'), which word I'm sure sounds ugly to a francophone and which book is an extended trope on de Saussure's observation that onomatopoeia is little proof contra the arbitrary nature of the sign. Most musings on phonaesthetics remind me of arguments about the supposed beauty or ugliness of certain languages. Not to say we shouldn't discuss such things, just don't ask me to believe in the truth of an allegedly ugly word. Take the word syphilis which is quite pretty as words in English go, but an ugly thing indeed. "Phyllis has syphilis" is a pretty sentence, no? Sounds pretty anyway, but pity the poor woman if she in fact did have this dread venereal disease. Strange enough, the word has a literary origin: it comes from the name of the eponymous hero, Syphilus, in Girolamo Fracastoro's poem Syphilis, sive morbus gallicus.
I'm also not sure I'm convinced that the words for crow and goose in Germanic (or Original Teutonic as Murray would have it) are onomatopoeic. Animals have a way of sounding different in different languages than one would expect. I love the sound that Danish pigs make, øf, which sounds softer than our harsh oink, but besides which neither sounds anything like any porcine snufflings I heard down on the farm in my youth. The point of Tolkien's contructed language, Black Speech, having harsh sounds ("positively bristling with velars"), may have more to do with the professor's native tongue being English rather than say Afrikaans or Hebrew. Otto Jespersen, Valdimir Nabokov, and Alexander Scriabin all had notions about phonaesthetics, too, and may reward the patient reader. Jespersen observed the symbolic differences between high front unrounded vowels like /i/ and mid to lower back rounded vowels like /o/, /a/, etc. Nabokov and Scriabin both associated phonemes with colors and memories in general.
Other links to peruse:
Been mulling over the shape of blogs, and how the default organization is chronological. Top down, latest to earliest entries. And, what about version control? Most blogs seem to leave entries as written, using comments to adjust or annotate the text. Some bloggers use a strike-through font style to indicate some kind of editing. Besides organizing entries chronologically, there is an attempt in most blogware to assign categories to entries. Most seem to only allow a single category per entry. So finding stuff is left to some kind of search-engine-like functionality. I keep pondering linking entries, both intra- and extra-blog, and need to come up with a style for doing this. So far, I've tended to use a via blog name with links, between square brackets, but these trails are beginning to grow. It's quite easy between Google, Technorati, and individual blogrolls to stray two or three blogs away from home and discover some nice juicy fact that you wish to link to, annotate, and discuss. I wouldn't want to leave out any of the middle blogs as it were.
Anyway, last night I was searching around, and came across some interesting texts concerning version control, content managment systems, and blogware.
Funny that neither mentions Wikis which I think of as ur-blogs. Wikis organize entries according to WikiWords (sort of a cross between headwords, catchwords, and categories). I just need to read, read, re-read, and cogitate. More, later.
Finally, a blog entry, neither too ranting nor too fawning, on postmodernism. Got there [via Stumbling Tongue via Ad Usum Delphinorum].
If I were forced to make a choice between the postmodern stance and the high modernist stance, I'd choose the postmodern, and I'd do so very quickly. Why? Because there's much about the postmodern stance I find useful. It can be a way of keeping your poise in the midst of media chaos, and a way of opening up to the various sets of terms these realities present too. It reminds us to take things for what they are -- to identify the category a work belongs to before judging it rather than measuring all works against a single standard.
I like the distinction made between prescriptive and descriptive postmodernism, but I don't think that academia has any particular rights to this turf. In fact, ideology is just a human condition.
I'd heard of it word of mouth, but I finally got around to reading the Wired article in which Marvin Minsky blasts the field he co-founded into smithereens.
"The worst fad has been these stupid little robots," said Minsky. "Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart. It's really shocking."
On the other hand, it's the second time in the past month that I've run across Douglas Lenat's Cyc project. A friend who's into the semantic web was saying that it looked like something that just might succeed, but not to be too optimistic. AI and optimism just don't seem to go together.
It's been over a fortnight, and the neo-conservative libel against France continues, and yet it no proof has turned up. An article at CBS includes the text of a letter that the French ambassador Jean-David Levitte sent to members of Congress.
In keeping up with francophone IT terminology, viz., here's the latest: the Quebecker approved word for smiley: binette [via Les coups de language de la grande rousse]. To replace the anglicism smiley (and its more generic term, emoticon), along with calques such as souriard, they've proposed using the word binette which literally means '(garden) hoe' but also has a colloquial meaning of 'face, mug' and an older meaning of 'wig.' (Not sure if it's as pejorative in meaning as our term hatchet-faced.) Gamillscheg suggests that the secondary meaning comes from a wigmaker to Louis XIV by the name of Binet. The primary meaning, on the other hand, as a deverbal noun comes from biner which is derived from a Vulgar Latin verb, binare 'to work a field a second time.' Meyer-Lübke also mentions [via Wartburg] another verb, biner with the meaning of 'küssen,
I ran across a succinct exposition of why the term "sci-fi" is objectionable to some fans of SF (and I don't mean the country of Finland or the Californian city of San Francisco). I remember a few decades back referring to some science fiction story as being great sci-fi (pronounced to rhyme with hi-fi) and being taken to task mightily by my friend Laurence. Years later, when I first discovered Usenet, I read of the preferred pronunciation of the dread term sci-fi as skiffy. V. and I immediately and iconoclastically started to refer to all SF (good, bad, and ugly) as skiffy from then on. Well, this, and my recent entry on strange and hypercorrective plurals of latinate words lead me to think about nerdish plurals. You know, the plural of Vax is Vaxen and of fan is fen, though Unix becomes Unices. (These are based on analogies with ox / oxen, man / men, and index / indices.) In high school I did the same thing with sister, marking the plural as sistern (based on brother / brethern) and puerilely reminding one of cistern. What would Freud have said?
Lots of people use Amazon dot com to order their books online, but NoAmazon dot com would rather we don't. It's all about the evil of patents for software, and I tend to agree that the whole patenting software things has gotten out of control. My current fave is [via NoAmazon] exercising a cat with a laser pointer. How is this absurd patent any different from one for XOR backing store or one click shopping?
Why are programming languages brittle? Richard Gabriel has this to say about that.
For example, "Design a system where if someone deletes 1KB of code, the system will self-repair in 24 hours." I will be summarizing the workshop in the next month, and we will publish a manifesto. Maybe some prizes will be given for them.
Good sentiments from a great Lisp geek. How did I end up at this blog entry? I'm not quite sure. It's been a long Memorial Day weekend here in the States, and I've missed a couple of days' entries worth of blog writing. I've been reading Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice which V. and I saw last year in Ashland and Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession, which I read about a decade ago. In between, I've been looking over open source e-learning software, prepping for an online class I've been wanting to teach. On top of that we watched a bunch of flicks on DVD: Virgin Suicides, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Reign of Fire. All in all, an eclectic weekend.
Anyway, I got sidetracked by a public argument between Nikolai Bezroukov and Eric S. Raymond. It started with this article in the online journal, First Monday, spread out over to Slashdot, and ended with this short but to the point article.
OK, so programming languages need to be more forgiving, like natural languages, but then we won't be writing programs, but some other kind of texts. Not that I'm against this in any way, just, but ... It reminds me of the turn philosophy took after Heidegger started writing poetry in place of phenomenology. Most of the contemplative pieces you find on programming languages tend to be of the, X is a superior programming language compared to Y. Someday, instead of writing halfassed blog entries, I'll get down to the difficult task of specifying my category-oriented programming language.
I've been stewing recently over spam (unsolicited commercial email) and how much I receive on a daily basis. My current filtering solution is the procmail-based junkfilter, but I'm thinking of moving over to some kind of you're on my whitelist, or you get bounced, system.
Well, the good folks at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) want to keep tabs on you J. Q. Citizen.
The Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting proposals to develop an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities. The objective of this "LifeLog" concept is to be able to trace the "threads" of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships.
They're soliciting bids. Maybe it's time to sell out and go to work for the government. Remember, only the guilty need worry.
The President has a new mission: the Healthy Forests Initiative. You see the forests are overcrowded and need to be thinned out, i.e., logged. Reminds me of a movie my friend Eli Bleich made back in the late sixties called Let the Fires Burn during the Nixon administration. They never showed it. Meanwhile, up in the Redwood Empire, Arcata (in Humboldt county) has criminalized the USA Patriot Act. The EFF has this to say about the act itself.
Well, Rumsfeld wants Congress to lift a ban on studying the use of low-yield nukes in war. Not to worry, it's just a study, but if they got off the whiteboards they might come in handy in getting rid of biological weapons. Can you say "arms race?" Good, I thought you could. Just some more money down the rabbit hole of the military-industrial complex.
Using public transit to get home last week after teaching class, I saw this Tom Tomorrow cartoon in one of the local alternative newspapers. It is funny and probably the reason why Ari Fleicher is retiring from his office as President Bush's pie-hole (PR guy). When I was in the private sector, slaving away in the belly of the great software beast, we called it "pursuing other opportunities elsewhere." It meant you'd been downsized. You want fries with that pink slip?
Today's WSJ had an article about big-time spammers getting a dose of their own medicine: PBXs hacked and phones ringing off the hook, prank snail mail magazine subscriptions, and email boxes bombed with anti-spam literature. Google News and Technorati lead to some online stories: Wired Online and [via Born Angry blog]. The spammers that have been interviewed all say they only send out email to people who've opted in to receive spam. That is BS. I get inordinate amounts of spam that are addressed to alias addresses I use only to register domains with. These scum or their bottom-feeding cohorts are skimming address off of whois records and the rest of the internet, plain and simple. Of course, I neither condone nor condemn spam or anti-spam activities. Those folks have made their beds, pissed in them, and now have to sleep it off. Feh! Want to unite to fight unsolicited commercial email? Here's a couple of links: SPEWS and Spamhaus.
According to an article by Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei in the Washington Post President Bush is suffering from little or no political fallout from his administration's failure to turn up weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This had been reason number one for the urgency of going to war without an OK from the United Nations. Oh, well, apathy rules. One wonders what kind of ordnance would have been aimed at or dropped on the previous US president in the same circumstances. Oh dear, oh my. The Democrats in Congress seem to be suffering from the same malaise.
A cute article in the Christian Science Monitor about defrenching the English language. Similar in tone to Twain's famous text on rationalizing English spelling.
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
As for the word, theedish, it is a saracastic proposal for a nation-neutral word to replace English. From the Old English word þéod 'people, nation', if the denominal adjective had survived it would have been cognate with German Deutsch.
What a nice idea: a blog that tracks blogs in London according to the nearest Tube station. [via Brainstorms and Raves blog] I'm now pinging weblogs dot com to let them know when I've updated the UJG blog. (Though, it seems to be timing out on me. Hmm.)
I've been waiting to see what the French would have to say, and they've finally said it. The ambassador, H. E. Jean-David Levitte, sounds okay to me: he's a linguist as well as a lawyer. Here's his warning from last February. With all the allegations flying in the neo-conservative press, you have to wonder what tomorrow's press will bring.
I stumbled across a flaming rant [via von Fintel's blog] "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient" by Allin Cottrell. His thesis is explicitedly stated as "[t]he word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others." I agree with Cottrell that it's better to separate the content from it's form (via some sort of markup), but this can be handled, as he admits late in the essay, by using styles (such as FrameMaker's paragraph and character catalogs) rather than ad hoc formatting of a document, but I think it's a fundamentally flawed argument. It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools, or, better yet, one can write bad FORTRAN programs in any language. What it really boils down to is a rant against Microsoft Word, which I agree is a piss-poor piece of software to either use or hold up as a standard. In a way, this reminds me of how first-year film students (in the days of celluloid) used to complain about the equipment they were forced to use and its non-state-of-the-art-ness. I always used to advise them to shoot a film like Potemkin, which had been produced with a hand-cranked camera, edited with scissors, and then to get back to me. Writing on yellow legal pads, using Emacs, vi, or FrameMaker, shouldn't really have that much of an impact on the content of your text, unless like some, you think that our tools affect our thoughts, warping us. Some, like Jakob Nielsen, warn us not to use PDF files in place of good old HTML. I am not convinced. I find it hard, both physically and aesthetically, to read lengthy texts in HTML on a screen. I find a PDF more enjoyable and easier to read. Sorry Jakob, I don't think that books are endangered by the web. There's something comforting about the standard way of navigating a document (it's called reading) which I learned as a child that PDF leverages. Anyway, the reason I'm learning XML, XSLT and XSL-FO, and the rest of the W3C alphabet soup, is so we can write software that allows texts to adapt themselves to the reader and her environment. Arguing that one should distribute documents as Postscript rather than PDF reminds me of the time-wasting debate between Beta and VHS. Of course, Beta was better all around, except in marketing ("Can you say Xerox PARC?"). In the end, they are both being replaced with DVD, and a whole new set of arguments. It's like arguing whether the MP3 file format is harmful?
A good article on the rise of unreconstructed and uncivil American male chauvinism in the Atlanic Online. I see this as just another indication that unbridled lust is afoot in politics, economics, and the culture at large. [via the Arts and Letters Daily]
It's the 50th anniversary of Fahrenheit 451 and Ray Bradbury talks about a censored high school edition of the book and how cloning'll never catch on. It's more fun the old-fashioned way, eh?
And, finally, the Matrix Reloaded is hitting the silver screens today. There was a nice piece in the New Yorker telling us why the sequel fails the first film. One of the online essays mentioned in Adam Gopnik's article written by philosophy professor James Pryor is quite stimulating.
Well, I knew the news was just too good or the economy too bad up north in Portland, but the Multnomah County Department of Human Services had advertised yesterday for Klingon interpreters (amongst 54 other languages). I just assumed that it was a spelling checker screw up that translated Tlingit into TlhIngan 'Klingon,' even though the Tlingit live in Alaska. Today, it's been announced that they really don't need Klingon interpreters. Too bad. Somehow, students at Reed must've been involved.
Getting ready to teach this summer's intro C++ class at a local university, and, of course, procrastinating instead, I ran across Tim Bray’s weblog. Here’s a nice musing on were semantics and markup intersect. I first ran across Bray during the early ’90s when I was supposed to be doing research for my masters thesis project but instead was procrastinating by reading articles on digitizing dictionaries.
My last entry on mistaken Latin morphology sent me off to reread the FAQ for the news group alt.usage.english. It includes a good write-up of the "between you and me" construction, as well as Greek and Latin plurals. There's also a sub-site dedicated to uk.culture.language.english.
I've been reading Linguistics in America: 1769-1924 by Julie Tetel Andresen. Ben Franklin's founding of the American Philosophical Society and Thomas Jefferson's study of Old English have been perking up my early mornings over coffee. Andresen's terminus ad quem is, of course, the year of the Call for the Linguistic Society of America. In need of further research is George Blaettermann, a Leipzig-trained linguist, who was appointed professor of modern languages at the University of Virginia in 1825.
There's a spectre haunting Latin grammar online. People are forming plurals for latinate words with absolutely no respect for Latin morphology. Just today, I ran across opii as the plural of opus 'work'. The plural of opus is opera, if you wish to be pedantic, or opuses. Opii is the genitive singular of opium. Extra points if you know what gender opus is. Neuter: why else magnum opus. Next is virus. Virus is another neuter, third declension noun in Latin. Take a look in Google and you'll come across spurious forms such as: viri, virii, vira, virora. They're all wrong. It's a trick! There was no plural for virus 'slime, poison' which was a collective noun. (Collective nouns, though singular in form, are plural in meaning, e.g., vulgus 'the people,' pelagus 'the sea') There's a good run-down on the Perl website. The plural of virus is viruses. This tendency is sometimes called hypercorrection. A similar habit is the often-reviled "between you and I" of the pseudo-literate. And finally, what is the plural of octopus? Either octopodes or octopuses, but never octopi.
Stuart Hughes has a blog called Northern Iraq and Beyond. A nice bloggish bit of journalism. He's a BBC producer who started keeping his blog shortly after arriving in Northern Iraq. In April, he lost his foot after his colleague stepped on a landmine. He's back in Wales recuperating. He has posted some great pictures.
Poul Nyrup Rasmussen has a blog. Who's he? He used to be the Prime Minister of Denmark. (It's a country in Europe.) Here's what he had to say about the EU and Iraq last year. I keep trying to imagine a former US president writing in a blog. Now my brain hurts.
If, as Bill Gertz alleges, the French government provided passports to fleeing Iraqi officials during the second Gulf War, why hasn't the evidence (from US intelligence officials) been published yet? In theory, they are working for the US government, aren't they. Why didn't they pass the information on to their superiors, instead of leaking the story to Sun Myung Moon's employee at The Washington Times? So, perhaps we should just treat this rumor as a unsubstantiated until proof is forthcoming. Neo-conservative schlockmeisters are having a field day, though, whipping up the gullible into a fevered anti-France lather.
I, on the other hand, am reveling in a self-imposed francophilia. Here are some links that run counter to the current folderol:
Just who is this Karl Rove? College drop-out, power behind the throne, etc. Ron Suskind reveals a bit more about the most feared man in the White House man who orchestrates the all things Bush. Rove's been called the Goebbels of the Bush regime for his endless stream of Nixon-style dirty tricks. And just who was behind all the multi-colored jumpers the sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln were wearing during Dubya's kick-off campaign ad. Of course, why isn't Bush's being AWOL for the more than a year during his military "service" in the Texas National Guard during the Vietnam War being played up more by the media? Where's the sport in shooting fish in a barrel? Sigh.
Betsy Rothstein has gathered together some funny and frightening things that our elected representatives say on a daily basis. I have a friend who served as a congressional aide way back when, and he told me that the House and Senate have been filled with foul-mouthed and horny good old boys from time immemorial.
Taxi driver Ratso Russo, passed along this article by progressive author Thom Hartmann describing how to take back America. It came over the transom about the same time I stumbled across this orphaned manfiesto by Greg Ruggiero. (The original website that published it has gone the way of many post-dot-com hosts, but using Google's cache, I was able to get a copy and store it locally.) I've been pondering our broken two-party, electoral system lately and Hartmann's text at least soothed my jangled nerves.
The other day I ran across a six pack of something called Czechvar at a local store. Sure enough investigation of the label showed it was brewed in Ceske Budejovice (AKA Budweis in the days of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire). Well, finally, the real Budweiser had made it to the States, though without its infamous name. Anheuser-Busch (the world's largest brewer by volume) has spent the last century trying to eradicate or buy out the Budvar brewery in Budweis. In the Czech Republic, Budweiser is a German adjective describing the location that a product comes from. (The Czech version of this adjective is Budejovicky.) So, it's one big intellectual property battle similar to the problem that vintners in the French Champagne appellation have with with Californian sparkling wine producers calling theirs "champagne." Funny thing is there's an older brewery in Budweis. Budejovicky Pivovar (or Budvar, a portmanteau word) was founded in 1895, but Budweiser Bürgerbrau, founded in 1795, is also brewing a Budweiser beer called Samson. The verdict on the beer in the bottle was good, but I still must travel to Budweis some day and drink a glass of draft in situ.
Funny thing how the tobacco and the alcohol industries had both escaped the rigorous moral criticism of William J. Bennett (ex-Drug Czar under Bush and ex-Secretary of Education under Reagan), while both marijuana smoking and peace marches were exhibited as examples of America's "erosion of moral clarity." Now it turns out that gambling happens to be one of those victimless peccadillos, too. "If it's a problem, you shouldn't do it." Strong words, indeed, but it probably wasn't Bill's fault, just something henky in his upbringing. It is a relief to know that while he may have lost upwards of $8 million dollars, he never really put his family at risk. Whew! Bennett's people are not hanging him out to dry yet. After all it's the man who has a little gambling problem, and that really has little to do with the validity of his argument. (Yeah, like that argument flies in Washington DC.) What they don't seem to realize is that Bennett's being a meally-mouthed hypocrite doesn't validate his argument either. They also don't seem to understand that there's a natural tendency of those so harshly chided to enjoy some Schadenfreude when a self-appointed virtues-monger fails so miserably to lead his community by virtuous example.
Some new examples of the baiting of the French (our enemies du jour) by Bill Gertz. Today he wrote in the Washington Times about the French selling Saddam a nuclear reactor back in the late '70s. The day before Gertz wrote an article alleging that the French issued passports in Syria to fleeing Iraqi officials so they could evade the American-British coalition and flee to Europe. (We'll have to await more proof on that one.) Gertz is a neo-conservative media darling. His latest book damns both the Clinton administration's foreign policy and the FBI's / CIA's / NSA's failures in detecting and preventing the events of 9/11.
Carl "Ratso" Russo (over on indieWIRE) gives a wrap-up for the 46th San Francisco International Film Festival. Good fun. Sorry I missed it.
Words as old as smog [< smoke + fog] or as new as blog [< web + log] are called portmanteau words. Lewis Carroll coined the term to describe the linguistic blending of two words. Humpty Dumpty uses it to explain what words like slithy [< slimy + lithe] in Jabberwocky meant [1]. I was looking at a Welsh blog [2], when I paused to ask myself: "What do Francophones call blogs?" It seems there's a longish set of candidates: carnet, joueb [< journal + web], etc. I hoped that the Académie Française might provide some help, though their list doesn't include blog [3].
[1] Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chapter 6:
"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."
"That's enough to begin with," Humpty Dumpty interrupted: "there are plenty of hard words there, `Brillig' means four o'clock in the afternoon — the time when you begin broiling things for dinner."
"That'll do very well," said Alice: "and "slithy'?'
"Well, 'slithy' means 'lithe and slimy.' 'Lithe' is the same as 'active.' You see it's like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word."
"I see it now," Alice remarked thoughtfully: "and what are toves?
"Well, 'toves' are something like badgers — they're something like lizards — and they're something like corkscrews."
"They must be very curious creatures."
[2] Welsh seems to have borrowed the English word blog, plural blogiau.
[3] Still, I suppose I should be grateful that the protecting la belle langue française against all kinds of barbarous inroads. Now I know the difference between un mouchard and my elbow.
It seems that this May Day past was also Loyalty Day [1]. Now this isn't just some spur of the moment proclamation by President Bush. He has proclaimed both in 2002 and 2001. And the previous occupant of the White House was not above some proclaiming himself. As a matter of fact, Loyalty Day (AKA Law Day) traces back to a proclamation of President Eisenhower in 1958 and a joint resolution of Congress in 1961. The ABA lobbied long and hard to get it proclaimed an official holiday in order to combat the forces of International Communism, but few realize why the ex-Soviet Union used to parade its miltary might around on May Day. In fact, May first was proclaimed International Workers' Day in memory of a strike which took place in Chicago, on May 1, 1886, in favor of the eight-hour work day [3]. Somewhere along the way, law and loyalty became synonymous in the American plitical mind.
[1] Strange times when I agree with the Libertarians, but perhaps there is just too much government.
[2] Best know for his golfing and heart attacks.
[3] How un-American!
Dennis Miller has written an op-ed piece in the WSJ [1] about an op-ed piece that Norman Mailer wrote in the London Times. (I wonder if it pays better than shilling for phone companies.) The American white male (AWM) has once again been assailed in his ivory tower. But fear not, Miller has allies: Rush Limbaugh and David Leibowitz have arrived to do battle with the aging Mailer. And it's not long before the conservatives' bête noir, Michael Moore, is trotted out to play his role as the Hobbyhorse of the Right. What these folks seem to miss amidst all the churning brouhaha is that it's an American tradition to hoist the status quo by their petards (in the etymological sense of the word) while cheering the underdog on. (Think of it as noblesse oblige.) Nobody has proven to me that AWMs, a set to which I may or may not belong depending on diverse environmental variables [2], are an underclass, no matter what Rush and his ilk screech.
If Michael Moore wants to write a humorous and over-the-top-rhetorically book on stupid guys generally in charge of things and if enough people buy it to put it on some kind of best seller list, then I say "All's fair in the mediawars." But if sour grapes Limbaugh and Leibowitz, with a wee, dank Miller in tow, want to fret and scorn, then I just want to ask them: "Aren't your AWMs made of stronger stuff?" And how about: "Aren't Mailer and Moore AWMs, and aren't they laughing all the way to the bank in spite of, or perhaps because of, their self-loathing?" Finally, Miller writes at one point that it's really Mailer who's hung up on color (race) because he's always bringing it up in his piece. Well, shucks, I'm not 100% sure about this, but the last time I checked there was still one or two racial problems in this grand land of ours.
[1] Unfortunately available online by subscription only.
[2] For example, just imagine my tender shock when I learned in grade school that because my name ended in a vowel I was most probably not white.
As Walter Benjamin was in the middle of writing his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Dresden, his typewriter broke. He took it to be repaired, but after two days it still hadn't been fixed, and he simply bought a new, English typewriter, and continued writing. Here's the complete story in German.
Fun article in the Guardian Unlimited on America's not-so-secret economy: pot, porn, and illegal alien labor. It's nice to see that the backbone of American economy in times past, our stalwart yeoman farmer, is making a comeback growing a fine, traditional cash crop, hemp. I wonder if the boys in Washington are planning on exporting these bits of democracy to the newly freed Iraq?
Been catching up on my linguistic blog reading and ran across this gem:
Well, the English are lazy when it comes to their own language. They treat it like a ten dollar hooker with no self-respect and a high tolerance for having the shit beaten out of her.
Seems that Baldur Bjarnason is one cranky Icelandic fish out of water. One wonders why he chose to study in England since the country and its people drive him apeshit. He's also upset with the late Professor Tolkien for rummaging through his folk's discarded mythology. This is just the sort of rhetoric one expects from a people long past their angry, colonizing phase.
His comparison of Icelandic reusing the word sími 'string, cord' for 'telephone', while denigrating the perfectly wonderful English neologism blog 'online journal', is just a tad bit twee. I am reminded of the old joke that has several Europeans arguing about which is the most beautiful language (French, Spanish, English, amongst others), using their respective words for butterfly, while a German sits in the corner getting angrier and angrier. Und vhat ist wrong mit Schmetterlingk? The beauty of a language is in the ear of the beholder. And as for his analysis of linguistic relativism: sarà vero ma non ci credo.
Jon Haddock has a new art piece called 98/107 that depicts the 98 senators who voted for the US Patriot Act. Pop quiz: who voted against it or abstained?
In his Origenes Antwerpianae, sive Cimmeriorum Becceselana novem libros complexa of 1569, Johannes Goropius Becanus argued that Dutch (or perhaps Flemish since Antwerp is in Belgium) is the original language. Like Sir William Jones' famous paragraph that kicked off comparative-historical linguistics, this fact can been gleaned from most books that deal in some way with the historiography of linguistics. And the belief that one's native tongue just happens to be the oldest and most original of the world's languages is still alive and here. Three examples will suffice: Andis Kaulins' case for the Latvian origin of Indo-European, Nostratic, et al., Keerthi Kumar's Dravidian origin of Indo-European languages, and Matej Bor's Slovenian origin of Venetic. I've also seen a book that connect Chinese and Sumerian. What brought all this up? Well, I'd been wallowing in the whole Shakespeare authorship question recently, and that just about leads to anything.
In re Goropius, read Professor Reinier Salverda's inaugural address delivered at University College London in 1990.
Here's the Jones paragraph for completeness' sake: "The Sanskcrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskcrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family..."
[Jones. Collected Works, vol. III, pp. 34-5]
The following snippet of text has been circulating on the net for a while: "... randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon. Saberi's work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang."
You can also try writing texts replacing vowels with hyphens, or as I did once, replacing vowels with schwas in a digitized recording of a spoken text. L-ng--g- -s -n -m-z-ngl- c-mpl-x th-ng.
[Addendum 09/29/03: See these entries also c-n y-- r--d th-s?, ashslay ottedday, visual word recognition, and 50-millisecond segments.]
Ken Arnold asks Are Programmers People? And If So, What to Do About It? and others on the Artima blog have added their comments. An interesting entry. Should programming languages follow human interface guidelines? It's always a joy to read a well-resoned and provocative article online. Even more so if it involves a subject close to ones heart. In one of his replies to a comment, Ken lists three books on object-oriented design that he recommends, none of which is per se on OOD.
Another great venue for online contemplative essays is the Portland Pattern Repository Wiki Wiki Web. A blog avant le lettre.
