While looking for something else entirely, I came across the home page of Eric Raymond (open source advocate of Cathedral and Bazaar fame). The sub-page that caught my eye was on adapting Tolkien’s constructed script, Tengwar, for writing Esperanto. He also has one pertaining to Lojban, another conlang.
Mr Bali Hai was back in the Bay Area teaching a class, and we got together after work at a Korean BBQ place on El Camino Real in Santa Clara. We didn’t much talk about blogging, though he had just found a great cold war doomsday device described online that he wrote an entry on. Ah, the ’50s and ’60s, and all that disposable income tied up in atomic ram jets full of H bombs.
It turns out that Saussure was wrong about the arbitrariness of the sign according to Stan Tenen of the Meru Foundation. I ran across his website and his article in the Noetic Journal.
To start, we might ask: What if claims of intrinsic natural meaning for these “sacred” numbers, letters, and other symbols are true in a philosophically deep way?
What if ancient “sacred” numbers, letters, and symbols were, somehow, exactly what they meant?
What if the natural geometry of the source of information also serves as the sign of information?
What if the natural geometry of the source of conscious volition also serves as the sign of conscious volition?
In the synchronicity department, I noticed that Tenen’s bibliography includes Jaynes’ Origin of Consciousness.
So, monopoly equals incentive. Mr Bill Gates on what’s wrong with free software.
CNET news dot com: In recent years, there’s been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, “We’ve got to look at patents, we’ve got to look at copyrights.” What’s driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?
Chairman Bill: No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.
And this debate will always be there. I’d be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned—including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system—there’s no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they’ve got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future.
[Interview via Ming the Mechanic via Boingboing]
Well, last night, after the plenary speech of the LSA in Oakland, a bunch of linguistics bloggers got together at the Mexicali Rose and slung words. Tensor, of Tenser, Said the Tensor, with his purple hair and charming wife, organized it. I was the last to arrive. When I introduced myself by my real name, people just stared, then I said, “Oh, Uncle Jazzbeau,” and knowing nods of recognition all around. First time I’ve done that in public. In no particular order, but moving round the table mentally à la Simonides of Ceos, we were: Mark Liberman of Language Log, Narissa of Journal Extime, yours truly, Uxor Tensoris of Terminal Student, Tensor, David Wilton of Word Origins, Grant Barrett of Double-Tongued Word Wrester, Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large (North America) of the OED, and Russell of Every Way But One.
At my end of the long table, we discussed ASL, loud deaf parties, Klingon, Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, the possibility of Geoff Pullum doing two constructed languages for a movie version of the same, Neal Stephenson and his œuvre, Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Dan Brown, Stephen King, belly dancing, conspiracy theories, comment spam, French and Vietnamese spooneristic literary devices, the incrediably strange book called Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission Through Myth, and the general linguistic and film critical silliness of John Simon. I was sorry I forgot my copy of The F-Word for Jesse to autograph. D’oh!