Tag: english

Wings off flies

Posted by sam – November 13, 2008

I wonder what proportion of bullshit in the world would be removed by the disappearance of the words “respect” and “spirituality”.

When someone demands your respect, it’s like a signal that they don’t deserve it. Instead of demonstrating their value to the rest of the world or being nice to you, they tell you what to think about them and then behave as if to do so is a human right (another problematic concept) of some kind. Respect is in great demand by:

-rappers
-religions
-Aretha Franklin

Aretha stands out here because she wasn’t really demanding the same kind of respect as religions and rappers – she just wanted her man to be as nice to her as she was to him. The other type of respect is more similar to Steven Duch’s concept of Thar, a value system of perpetually inflamed egos:

Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult
Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing
Obsessive male dominance
Paranoia over female sexual infidelity
Primacy of family rights over individual rights

Of course, these aren’t explicitly present in the more mundane invocations of respect, but the sentiment is there. The world is full of people who are always on the lookout for opportunities to be offended by something and who demand respect as a shield for their egos. They can’t accept their shortcomings and the uncaring nature of the external world so they spill their emotional panic into the brainspace of others.

Why care so much about what everyone else thinks that you stop thinking for yourself?

Spirituality I don’t really have a lot to say about. It’s just a bullshit word for people who are embarrassed by religion but want some of the same perks. As far as I can see it doesn’t have any independent meaning apart from as a general positive modifier, viz. “I’m a very spiritual person.” Translation: “I’m worth more than other people, I just can’t demonstrate it.”

Maybe I should introduce image tags:

Put this and a parser in your pipe and smoke it

Posted by sam – November 11, 2008

The well-known examples of ambiguity in natural language mostly stem from polysemy (especially across word categories), viz. Time flies like an arrow. In the “advanced” semantics & pragmatics class now being taught at the linguistics department I’ve become more attuned to the room for nuance in semantic (sometimes called thematic) roles, especially in Finnish.

One aspect of this is that many undergoer-roles are expressed with the accusative case which, morphologically speaking, doesn’t independently exist. By this I mean that Finnish isn’t considered by Fennicists to have an accusative case but to instead mark direct objects with the genitive (perfect aspect, söin omenan – I ate an apple) and partitive (progressive aspect, söin omenaa – I was eating an apple) cases. But from a typological (comparative linguistics, if you will) point of view, these together with the special word forms of personal pronouns (minut, sinut, hänet, meidät, teidät, heidät) constitute an accusative case.

This leads to entertaining ambiguities between possessives and objects. My favourite example is from an actual headline from some years ago:

Mies ampui vaimonsa kännykän haulikolla
Man shoot+imperf wife+gen+poss(of wife by man) mobile-phone+gen shotgun+adessive(“with”)
Man shoots wife’s mobile phone with shotgun

Some of the ambiguity is present in the English translation as polysemy, but notably here both “wife” and “mobile phone” are in the genitive, so either one (or neither!) can be taken as the direct object. If the mobile phone is a possessive form, the shotgun is naturally a special function present in it. I’m sure there would be demand for something like this in the market. Thus we may read:
The man shot his wife’s mobile phone with a shotgun
The man shot his wife with the shotgun function in his mobile phone
The man shot (something) with the shotgun function of his wife’s mobile phone

Additionally:
The man shot (used as ammunition) his wife’s mobile phone with a shotgun
The man shot (used as ammunition) his wife with the shotgun function in his mobile phone

Of course, this is a bit pathological – mostly syntax/morphology as semantic marking is sensible business.

Thursday night trolling

Posted by sam – November 7, 2008

Writing my previous entry put me in such a good mood that I had to check out a web forum I frequent for trolling opportunities. An evangelical Christian guy who suspects Barack Obama is a sign of the End Days had weighed in with:

Now, once again, I am certainly NOT saying that I definitely think that Barack Obama is the AntiChrist who is foretold about in the Bible.

However….

Barack Obama IS a current United States Senator from the state of Illinois…

And…

For Wednesday, November 5th, (which was the first full day of Barack Obama being the President-elect of the United States), the winning evening “Pick 3” lottery number in the Ilinois state lottery was… 6-6-6.

Not that this *definitely* means anything of course…

I’d been previously commenting that I hoped Obama might indeed be the Antichrist (why choose the lesser evil?) and wrote:

Well, that clinches it for me. To those with biblical knowledge: what kinds of blood sacrifices are most pleasing to the Antichrist? Should they be burnt sacrifices or should I just slaughter them at an altar and then do whatever with them? Do I need to build a special altar for this?

I kill myself.

And yes, I’m completely sober. But yeah, I should probably go to bed now.

Ventral striatum blues

Posted by sam – November 7, 2008

Not really my week, this: I broke my bicycle and the laptop in a minor accident. I wanted to take the bike for repairs in a shop in Töölö and my only computer was now my desktop at home, so I decided to try to coexist with the dog for at least a day.

Fast forward to tonight. When I went to bed the dog decided for some reason to stick to my side at all times so I could maximally enjoy its odour, nightly movements and general dogginess. Eventually I tried to shift the dog but it just lazily growled at me. Some ancient part of my brain said: “We have a 1000% weight advantage over this elderly female dog. If it is growling at us for wanting to sleep in our sleeping place, we should show it what’s what.” What this ancient brain-part didn’t understand is that things just don’t work like they did in the stone age anymore. The dog is in fact higher in social status than me – hell, it eats better food than I do. It would be impossible for us to do anything about the growling other than to back down, my frontal lobe said.

This caused my ventral striatum, which assigns emotional reward and punishment for social standing, to go berserk. It is old school like my lizard brain and started RRRAGING at what it couldn’t understand. Violent urges and negative emotions began to boil at a high heat in the dark places of my soul.

I guess the most productive thing would have been to cause the stone age parts of my brain to somehow grow up to the modern world, but that seemed to be a rather large undertaking in the circumstances. I decided to (make like my pants and) split before the factions of my brain did from each other, so I rode back to Herttoniemi at four in the morning on my wounded bike which I’m going to have to take back to town for repairs tomorrow.

Of course, to my girlfriend this isn’t so much an epic struggle between the dog and my ventral striatum as me being a whiny bitch who is terrified by living with a dog for a couple of weeks. But what you gonna do.

The French hijacked metube

Posted by sam – November 5, 2008

I unwarily clicked on a youtube link that started with fr. and now everything on youtube gets redirected there for me. First it was all in French but thankfully I at least managed to change that. It’s still helpfully offering me the language option at the top of the page. Beware the French youtube!

As for Obama’s predictable win,
Feels good man
I’m glad I don’t have his job, though. The Onion’s take was “Black man given nation’s worst job” and “Nation finally shitty enough to make social progress”. Anti-atheist bigot Elizabeth Dole lost her senate seat. Looks like the new McCarthy, Michelle Bachmann, kept her House seat. Whether Al Franken gets into the senate is still unclear.

Maybe if they stop being dicks at the border now I’ll take a trip there.

When I put mah bread in the tostuh, what pop out? Jesus!

Posted by sam – November 4, 2008

I’ll occasionally be dumping a bunch of interesting web items that don’t deserve to be in the sidebar.

Richard Hasen on the potential for litigation in the US Presidential elections

Bright light, an essay with a better thermodynamics-based understanding of life than I had before reading it

Youtube: Björk back in the day being cute/surreal

You know people who don’t seem to have personalities? Other than me, I mean. Maybe they’re INTP.

You may want to consider Richard Stallman’s people skills in the light of the previous essay

The danimal archive: the discomforting musings of a forgotten usenet warrior

God’s chess

Posted by sam – November 2, 2008

The longest forced mate (assuming black tries to postpone mate as far as possible) currently known: 524 moves. Nobody knows what the first 500 mean. As Tim Krabbé says of these computer wins, it’s like discovering the secret to the universe but it’s in Estonian.

Electric light

Posted by sam – November 2, 2008

I decided against threaded comments but added a way to reply to specific comments. The comments are internally numbered but the numbers aren’t displayed. I’ll eventually try to change that.

I moved to live with my mother and sister for a couple of weeks because I’ve been replaced by a dog for that period (don’t ask). I’d been looking forward to running in Herttoniemi/Viikki but today I found that a rather unpleasant stress injury from last year has recurred. It’s either tendinosis/tendinitis or some sort of neuroma – in any case a quite bad and worsening pain in whatever is the opposite of the insole (lateral plantar fascia?). Shit sucks! I’d gotten about as fit as I’ve ever been and now I’m going to have rest this for probably at least a week. Perhaps I need better shoes or a better gait or something. Well, there’s always biking.

Apropos of being in Herttoniemi, I’m available for human contact here. Tehäänks jotain Vadim?

I’ve been thinking about the best way to blog bilingually and it’s actually quite a difficult problem to solve. If I just tag all the English entries “english” the tag system is effectively useless for people who only want English entries because there’s no way to filter by multiple tags. Maybe I can use categories to achieve the wanted effect. Then again, I think I only have one English-only reader so far. But I do sometimes toy with the idea of acquiring a larger readership.

edit: getting the comment numbers was actually a matter of a single php expression in the appropriate theme file. I didn’t need the plugin after all. I shall now agonise over whether the handy reply and quote links justify keeping the plugin.

edit2: I added a strip of pictures. It kind of looks bad but maybe I just haven’t gotten used to it. I don’t know, maybe I could choose better pictures. I’ll leave it up for the time being. Also: tell me if it breaks css on your browser. I’m new at this stuff.

Victory

Posted by sam – November 1, 2008

I managed to do the unlikely: all my old lj posts are now imported. It is an epic story of xml and python which I may recount one day. Next I will delete some of the embarrassing old ones. They’re all untagged (this could change if I were extremely bored one day) and the comments aren’t there (this could change with an even more epic story of xml and python if I were extremely extremely bored one day).

Ok, so this will be my blog from now on. Let’s hope wordpress doesn’t turn out to suck because I would hate to go through all this again. I don’t know how commenting or user registration works yet, but it probably does work in some way. I’ll figure it out later. Of course I don’t really even need user registration for anything. There’s an openID plugin but I don’t want to have to figure it out. So just comment with any name you type in? I encourage impersonating other people, by the way. I don’t encourage spam, but there’s probably a good plugin for that.

Also, there appears to be an rss2 feed which may work.

edit: oh the hilarity: an unclosed html tag somewhere in September has caused that month and the rest of the wordpress template to be in italics when viewing that month. Gotta catch ’em all…

edit2: ok, registering users is actually super easy by default. So do that if you want to. It also looks like it’s super easy to spam.

edit3: my first wordpress wishlist item: the ability to disallow commenting for posts older than x days. My second wishlist item (I guess this is theme-dependant): folding archive view.

edit4: I set up a simple anti-spam scheme that requires commenters to have javascript and cookies turned on. Complain if this is a problem.

edit5: I added a link category for the blogs of people I know. I decided to include only blogs that are
1) of at least vaguely general interest
2) updated frequently
3) viewable by unregistered visitors
I have come up with one such blog so far. Note to people I know: you suck! But seriously, if you think you fill these criteria please point it out to me.

The creeping move

Posted by sam – October 31, 2008

Of the recently finished Chess World Championship my favourite moment came in game 10, the only one Kramnik won. In this position:



Kramnik as white made the move Qa6. Ignoring black’s c-pawn, white moves the queen one square without attacking any undefended piece or creating a threat against black’s king. Why make such a move? From a6 the queen denies black’s knight access to c4, controls b7 and prepares the way for the advance of white’s a-pawn. Black’s positional problems are nailed down and white ends up marching the a-pawn to drive away black’s knight, then taking control with a rook on the b-file with black seemingly helpless to do much about it. This sort of quiet, approaching, limiting move is often called a “creeping move”. It’s very difficult for weak players like me to understand when such a move is strong, but it was a pleasure to see it work so effectively here. Kramnik said of this phase of the game “It seems that I didn’t do anything special and then the position was already winning… it’s a pleasant surprise.” A unique perspective.

It would be nice to be able to make creeping moves in life as well, but in general it’s just too complicated. People can decide not to play by the rules you expect them to. Perhaps this sort of thing can happen in politics or war.

Today I saw Woody Allen’s new film Vicky Cristina Barcelona which partly made me think of this. The first quarter or so of the film contains some excellent portrayals of the psychological views of PUAs (Pick-Up Artists), presumably unintentionally. I don’t know does Javier Bardem’s character exactly make creeping moves, but he certainly leaves practically no choice to the women he seduces.

The film also has a somewhat bleak but potentionally educational view of American women, or possibly women in general (it was difficult to tell). There may certainly be an interesting lesson in the film on that theme for some people amongst my readership. Overall I must say I don’t understand why the cultured anglosphere of The Guardian and NYT seems to have turned its back on Allen. They say he’s just a boring, creepy, ogling old man now but I suspect they’re just jealous.

My irony meter broked

Posted by sam – October 30, 2008

…and my head asplode.

Slobber slobber slobber

Posted by sam – October 10, 2008

The first stop for those planning a bacon-vodka party: bacon vodka.

Coming up: vodka bacon.

Kuin kaksi marjaa

Posted by sam – October 9, 2008

Sirs,

I couldn’t help noticing a certain resemblance between World Chess Champion Alexander Alekhine and Anthony Hopkins. Could they be related?


Hopkins


Alekhine

Sometimes a great notion

Posted by sam – October 3, 2008

First great idea of the day: bacon party.

Second great idea of the day: bacon and vodka party.

Maybe this could be combined with the no talking -party, which is the greatest party idea ever.

The most important economics lesson for leaders

Posted by sam – September 30, 2008

If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.

Move over once, move over twice

Posted by sam – September 26, 2008

From the New York Times:

Washington Mutual, the giant lender that came to symbolize the excesses of the mortgage boom, was seized by federal regulators on Thursday night, in what is by far the largest bank failure in American history.

The news these days is reminiscent of a Monty Python bit:

SUPERIMPOSED CAPTION: ‘SUPERINTENDENT HARRY “BOOT-IN” SWALK’

SWALK: We admit that there have been outbreaks of hanging recently, but the police are trying to keep the situation under control. You must remember the courts are very busy at the moment and the odd death sentence is bound to slip through. Electrocutions are another big worry. But we hope that guillotining has been eradicated from the urban areas. And garrotting is confined almost entirely to Luton. So if you have a friend in prison or under the sentence of death, be sure to let us know at this address.

Cut to a mortuary. Various trolleys lie about with corpses covered by sheets. Two workers are sitting at a low make-shift table with cups of tea and a transistor radio, shelling eggs and dropping them in a pickling jar.

VOICE ON RADIO: …and Premier Chou En Lai, who called it ‘a major breakthrough’. Twelve men were accidentally hanged at Whitby Assizes this afternoon whilst considering their verdict. This is one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Britain since Tuesday.