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Bill Poser in Language Log responds to Norimitsu Onishi's statement from A recent Letter from Asia: Of all languages in the world, Japanese is the only one that has an entirely different set of written characters to express foreign words and names. Just seeing these characters automatically tells the Japanese that they are dealing with something or someone non-Japanese. with some explanations about the Japanese written system, which consists of three character sets: kanji "Chinese characters", hiragana and katakana. Skipping the details, hiragana is the default, while katakana is marked. When you want to mark something as special, you use katakana, rather like italics and scare quotes are used in English <...> but it isn't really very different from the English practice of writing words and expressions still perceived as foreign in italics, such as ad hoc and force majeure. There is an ongoing translation of Joel Spolsky's opuses into various languages, performed by groups of anarchist-volunteers. I participated for a while in this teamwork, and our team didn't have an official language to discuss translations, so there was a mixture. Some were more comfortable with Russian, some with English, and most switched from one to another somewhere in the middle of the sentence. Later, I exchanged few E-mails with a member who used exclusively English. Following his manner, I soon found that it became easier to talk about translations, because Russian words stood out, and there were no need to use quotes or other means to mark which part of a sentence is what the sentence is talking about. Hofstadter's famous quine "is a sentence fragment" is a sentence fragment could acquire an alternative, "quotes-free" incarnation. Japanese would provide yet another incarnation, with its build-in katakana feature. Renee has a great entry on the subject. From what I know, she left the USSR when she was a teenager, and she lived in Israel since then. She is now a graduate student at the University of Berkeley. When I sat down to digest this interesting physiological phenomenon, I somehow concluded that it's due to a self-identification crisis. I summoned Michelle, my crazy historian friend, and confided in her that I don't have a homeland, I have feelings of nostalgia but there's no place I am nostalgic for, I don't like to go places and I don't like to stay in one place too long, and on top of everything I don't have a native language. Michelle gave my situation some serious thought. Finally she explained that I don't have an identification crisis because I know well enough who I am. As for my coutry/location crisis, said Michelle, "You only have one choice. You must become a nation". I must confess that becoming a one-person sovereign nation appealed to me so much that I was instantly cured of my self-identification crisis. I did not design a flag though. This small piece helped me a lot. You need your fellow displaced people to feel like home.
Christopher Alexander. The Oregon Experiment.
Book Description: "Focusing on a plan for an extension to the University of Oregon, this book shows how any community the size of a university or small town might go about designing its own future environment with all members of the community participating personally or by representation. It is a brilliant companion volume to A Pattern Language." I had this entry in my old blog, and I copy it now for not to forget to get the book. :) 
It is now the Union of Soviet States of America. This is good stuff! A comic book for children "what a family life would be like in a communist United States" It continues with some historical comics about the origin and the nature of Russian communism. The book was published by the Catholic Guild, which makes me wonder why did Catholics decide to become better propagandists than communists themselves? This part is hillarious: 
"Since I am a public librarian that should be easy!" I envision University professors stealing anti-communist books from University libraries... Reminds me comics from my childhood. One picture I remember particularly well: a guy with a sign hanging on his neck: "Bachelor of Science will accept any job" entering a restaurant. The whole picture was in depressing black and dark brown colors, and the place was full of drunk guys laying around, and the "bachelor of science" looked like he was just let out of Oswiecim. Then, we didn't call our college graduates "bachelors", so the word was very unusual and sounded similar to "Nobel Prize laureate" to me. Now how evil is it that such a bright guy had to beg for a job in a restaurant???
A review, attempt number 1. The term "hack" exists at least since fifties, and at first it had nothing to do with computers, designating "any activity that lead to an interesting and unusual solution, or caused nondestructive mischief". "A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT" uses "hack" in this broad term. It describes hacks performed by MIT students since 1920-s. There are probably hundreds of hacks described, and to build a classification schema for this compendium of misbehavior was a non-trivial tasks by itself. As a result, the contents table resembles Borges' famous classification of animals allegedly found in a Chinese encyclopedia "Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge". This wouldn't be a problem by itself, but unfortunately, the contents table serves as a reference point for multiple "see something" links, and I had to repeatedly scan the two pages of contents, when I wanted to see what I was recommended to see. Life would be so much easier if "see something" links were equipped with page numbers! The hacks are described in a factual, rather dry and detached manner, which, frankly, makes dull reading. Descriptions can vary in length from a couple of pages to a single sentence: On a steamy August day in 1987, hackers erect a papier-mache snowman on the small dome. That the text is dense with MIT proprietary vocabulary doesn't help (am I supposed to know what "Infinite Corridor" means?) Neither do black-and-white, low-quality photos -- a big part of the hacks is classified as "visual", and it would help if you could really see an artifact, rather than to read about it! In fact, many of these photos are color, as you can see on the IHTFP Gallery, so there is no excuse to render them black-and-white in the book. In short, I had to struggle through the first half of the book. Things were easier after this critical point -- I searched the book for "MIT-English dictionary" and indeed, there was "Glossary of MIT Vernacular" at the back. More important, I realized than I need to employ my imagination. Reading about "performance" hacks, for example, reminded reading a cookbook -- all the ingredients are described, yet you might still be not sure how the dish is supposed to taste. In a scene reminiscent of the abduction of Joe Buttle in the movie Brazil, the unsuspecting student was stuffed into a body bag and carried away. Leibowitz was then asked to sign a receipt for her return, sign for his copy of the receipt, and for the commando's copy of Leibowitz's copy of the receipt. By the last page I became a victim of the Stockholm syndrome -- I liked the book. Or, maybe more accurate, I liked the content (just check Al Gore Buzzword Bingo or the Case of the Disappearing President’s Office) -- now does anybody plan to publish "Encyclopedia of MIT hacks"?
Not sure what you thought the picture above represents, but it is a sentence in Ogham, a script used to "write very old Irish, from 3rd to 6th century of our era." The phrase above means "Fáilte Romhat" or "Welcome" in Modern Irish. Ogham could be written both vertically and horizontally, and crossing lines cold be replaces by dotes (for vowels). In the last form it resembles Morse alphabet, except that 3rd century Irish apparently didn't care about ergonomic issues too much. Frequently used letters aren't always simpler than rarely used. I read that the Korean alphabet is considered the most logical in its organization. Perhaps this is true if we are talking about alphabets that are still in use. For me, Ogham manifests the most logical, and purely mathematical way of representing sounds. They are simply numbered: a = 1, o = 2, u = 3... Now you can write them horizontally, vertically, right-to-left, left-to-right; you can use lines or you can replace them by dots -- your reader will still probably be able to read your message! "The Pillow Book" written by a Japanese woman, Sei Shonagon, in the 10th century was posted as a blog. Some entries: This is from "Huh, men!" entry: I will never understand men. Their emotions are just really strange, and I just can't work out why they behave the way they do. There is nothing new under the Sun...
University of Copenhagen has an AI project on "conversation-mediated assistance", where agents performing this assistance are created based on metaphor of "ghosts" (Overview, PDF).
As the paper explains,
The notion of ghosts has been chosen because of traditional characteristics of ghosts found in the popular literature and in folk tales: Mark Liberman on Language Log comments:
After a brief scan of their site, I can add some other characteristics of ghosts that are useful from the point of view of system designers: To prove Mark Liberman's observations, here is "Thin Lizzy" ghost personality outlines: Despite keen celibacy the skinny and pale Lizzy died in an early age due to poor health. Being a former firm believer in a controlled lifestyle with vegetarian food, yoga exercise and refraining from male company her unjust death made her very bitter. Bodiless she has just acknowledged the true meaning of body pleasures and now she blames her former lifestyle for the untimely death. Lizzy mainly resides in the canteen trying to convince everybody to eat a lot of fat foods, meat, buying that extra piece of chocolate, drinking Coke instead of water etc. Many think that she is in conspiracy with the canteen owners, but actually she is on her own crusade, which is manifested when she interferes with any effort from the canteen to put more healthy dishes on the menu. At the slightest chance of romances, e.g. at parties, she is especially active in trying to couple students. Sometimes she goes too far in her eager revenge over her own former frigid life and digresses slightly into obscenity. Microsoft Word's own ghost, a Paperclipus Vulgaris™, which pops up, winks, and claims that she knows better what I am going to write in my letter, can rest.
Yesterday I tried a new recipe for making bread. Two previous were Classic White and Mediterranean Herbed. They had flour, margarine, sugar, salt and yeast (Mediterranean Herbed also basil, oregano and thyme). I liked them, but not as much as the last one I made: Sally Lunn. My book said: "Sally Lunn is believed to have been named after the Englishwoman who created this bread in her tiny bakery in Bath, England. The recipe was brought to the colonies and soon became a favorite in the South." It is different only in that it has eggs. Not sure why it makes such a difference, but it tastes better. And thinking about how old the recipe is, I am feeling a little dizzy. My next experiments will be Honey Mustard Bread (honey and mustard?) and Beer Bacon Bread. When people think about totalitarianism, for some reason they imagine Siberia, Gulags (in plural), mountains of dead bodies... All these pictures are as alien to me as they are to you. But here is real difference, and here is real freedom: nobody there would ever think about using beer and bacon to make bread! In "Spidering Hacks" book Ron Racheco describes the way to calculate a distance between two points based on their latitude/longitude (hack # 77). He calculated the distance from his house to his friend's house, which is about 7.5 miles, with the error of only 0.06 miles. The problem is how to find out the latitude and longitude of your house? I am skipping the author's attempts not to share with the reader the details of his research, and go right to the point, or, more precisely, MapPoint. Go to http:www.mappoint.msn.com/ and enter your address. Ok, but there is neither latitude nor longitude on the resulting page! Look at the URL, advices Ron. You'll find your coordinates after the parameter C. I followed his advice and now I am a happy owner of my exact coordinates. You can do it too! I recently discovered a Google bomb of my own making. "Uncontrolled vocabularies" isn't a scientific term, it's an anti-term so to speak, yet I am not too happy to hijack even an anti-term, and to pollute global information space with my own belongings. Today I visited Lilia Efimova's Mathemagenic blog, and there is a cute thingy nailed at the gate: If you search for mathemagenic that has nothing to do with weblogs try this. "This" is a Google's search request with parameters: mathemagenic -weblog -blog -Lilia -radio I think, this is a courteous way to clean the net from your information noise. Has anybody observed this practice before? How do you think it should be named? My v1.0 proposal is "Google anti-missile", but I am not sure if it makes any sense in English. Simon asked: By the way, what is it with you lot trying to hack Pebble?! ;-) This reminded me a folk story about a Russian sailor who bought "Rolex" and couldn't resist to try to break it. He tried everything: he threw it on the deck, took it into deep water, nothing helped. Finally he got a brilliant idea: he broiled it. The watch stopped! Happy, he brought the thing back to the store and demonstrated it to astonished sales people. "We'll pay you twice as much as it costs, just tell us, what did you do to it????" The proud sailor didn't keep his secret for too long. The next year, he visited the same city. He went to the store and there was a sign near the watch that said (in Russian): "Don't broil!" 
Laputan Logic has some amazing graphs (scroll to The History of Naming entry) that show relative popularity of male names since XIV century and up to the year 2000. "The graphs below show the ranking order of the top twenty names over time. While ranking doesn't convey a sense of relative population sizes, names like many things follow a power law distribution. During most of the period, at least up until 1800, 25% of the male population had the top ranked name, 50% had one of the top three names and over 80% had one of the top ten names." 
It is well-known by now that Google loves blogs. Today my natural curiosity prompted me to feed Google "Uncontrolled vocabularies" string to check how exactly Google loves Pebble. Well, try it. Today I almost missed Frank's thoughtful comment regarding establishing an International Haiku day on 5/7/5, because comment links are so gray and so small... What I needed was "Recent Comments" feature I saw on other blogs. My first though was to ask Simon, but this would be no fun. Instead, why not to try to tweak JSPs and see what will happen... Well, what happened, after some hashing unknown tags and variables around, I got a relatively decent "Recent Comments" section for my blog. "Relatively" because it doesn't show recent comments, it shows all of them. But hey, that's pretty good for 20 minutes of mindless copy&paste exercises and without seeing any documentation. I looked at JSPs from the default theme that are responsible for showing recent entries and comments, and picked up what I believed to be the most useful lines. Quickly enough it occurred to me that "comments to recent entries" is not the same as "recent comments to entries", so I decided to try to simply show all comments, just to check if this is possible. The first test failed because I left a wrong variable somewhere (something like ${recentDailyBlogEntry.comments} instead of ${blogEntry.comments} -- will I ever learn to pay attention?), and after one correction it worked! It showed a link to the entry and commentator's name. Disappointed with easy success, I decided to continue my attempts to break Pebble and to add a date. Damn thing still worked. I bet if I boss it around changing date format from "long" to "short" it will work too! And it did. I don't know how easily customized other blog software is, but I am impressed. I spent more time writing this report than actually "programming". This is, of course, because natural languages, unlike unnatural, don't provide any reusable tag library... Wait, no, they do.
Michael started it with his haiku. In about an hour Frank published a story about the public class Poem with a unit test, all in haiku, of course. How about the public class Sonnet?
An Introduction
A giant panda goes into one of those expensive and pretentious restaurants serving French/Asian fusion cuisine and takes a table for one. The surprised waiter for that table explains unctuously that his name is Marcel, he will be your server tonight, and we 'ave a number of specials (he is French), etc., etc.
"Here is a journalistic joke recounted by Gypsy da Silva, the legendary copy editor at Simon & Schuster. Upon arrival at the Pearly Gates, a reporter is issued a harp and wings by St. Peter. But the journalist wonders why the wings are on the small side. "Wing size is determined by the amount of abuse you have had to take in your lifetime," St. Peter says. "See these tiny butterfly wings? I give these to publishers, who take hardly any abuse from anybody." When the reporter pointed to a pair of wings with the spread of a condor, the heavenly gatekeeper said, "Those are for night editors." Suddenly a roar could be heard from a huge jumbo jet approaching, and St. Peter said, "Duck -- here comes a copy editor." William Safire. Cherry-Picking |
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