November 2009
Quick idea I may explore more fully later on: Irreducible complexity in politics. Irreducible complexity is a creationist concept (maybe it originated somewhere else, but that’s where I encountered it). Creationists argue that some features of living beings have irreducible complexity. This means that they could not have evolved in one step, because only the fully formed feature would...
The implementation of Hob →
Hob is a toy language under development. This is the story of its design and implementation.
This looks more well-thought-out and pragmatic than most toy languages. As a plus, it’s appropriately technical without being simply a source listing.
2 tags
A new way to explain explanation →
David Deutsch, in a TED talk:
(Omitted: account of the Greek myth about the cause of the seasons…)
Because the explanatory role of Persephone’s marriage contract could be played equally well by infinitely many other ad hoc entities. Why a marriage contract and not any other reason for regular annual action? Here is one. Persephone wasn’t released. She escaped, and returns every...
The Y Combinator →
So, as I’ve mentioned, I’m slowly getting interested in (parts of) computer science again. One of the most wonderful things in all of computer science, in my opinion, is the Y combinator. (It has nothing to do with Paul Graham.)
I periodically try to wrap my head around it. It’s like reaching enlightenment: getting there is a total mindfuck and that state of mind decays very...
Proverbs and quotations about language in many... →
Omniglot has a list. I like these:
“The more languages you know, the more you are a person.” — Bulgarian saying.
“It’s no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase ‘As pretty as an airport’ appear.” — Douglas Adams.
“Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of...
Flyting →
This is funny. Coincidentally, a round of wiki-ing led me to a grand old Germanic tradition I didn’t know about, the flyting. It was a sort of ancient freestyle match, in which the protagonists took turns insulting each other in creative ways, usually in complex meter. In Lokesenna, for instance, we find the Norse trickster god Loki insulting each of the gods in turn, accusing them of...
“One of the most egregious acts of kowtowing to the “massa” occurred recently in...”
– Ali Eteraz. (via)
True: it’s monumentally unfair to expect some groups to continually confirm their disgust with disgusting behavior, but not others. For most of us, it is assumed that as ordinary, morally upstanding people, we are appropriately disgusted by violence. We are innocent (of...
“It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without...”
– Walter Benjamin on Franz Kafka.
1 tag
Semantic satiation →
Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.
This is officially a series.
2 tags
Taste
I have this feeling that some works of art are good, because I like them, and some aren’t, because I don’t. But some of the works I don’t like are simply works that fall outside of my taste, works which might bore me or annoy me, but that I can see others enjoying; the rest of the works I dislike are works that not only fall outside my taste, but are actively bad, and the people...
“Hegelian kiss: dialiptical technique in which the kiss incorporates its own...”
– The Philosophy of Kissing.
Apropos, I’ve been reading about Plato’s thoughts on love, and really felt like slapping him, because, as far as I can tell (this is a secondary source, alright), he makes it into a grand philosophical theory, which is basically the opposite of love, which if...
That's what they said →
It’s interesting that when you record all the “ums” and false starts in normal conversations, everyone sounds like a total idiot. When you see it in writing, you wonder, “who the fuck is this idiot, who appears unable to string together a single coherent and grammatical sentence, and whose every uttering is filled with ums and interruptions and false starts?” In fact,...
FYI: this song is the opposite of Norway.
That is all.
On Go →
This has given me a new appreciation of Algol-68. It actually appears — gasp! — consistent, well-thought-out. And it was designed by committee. The interesting thing here is that the language specification was a complete mess, as conventional wisdom would tell you any design by committee would produce, but if you look at the actual programming language, it’s surprisingly clean.
...
I’m going to respond to this post by Ryan Irvine, because I think it’s a sloppy critique of my post on correlation. Let’s see what he says:
In his Daily Meh piece that got a lot of attention the other week, Simen argues, with no shortage inscrutable post-Graduate circular logic, that “all we have to help us establish causal relationships is correlation,” or, in so many words,...
Planet of the Hats →
My home world is very much like this one. It’s populated by billions of bipedal primates, who are just like people here: sometimes foolish, sometimes wise, sometimes hateful, sometimes generous. They are grouped into cities and nations, and sometimes they have wars, and sometimes they cooperate. You really would have a hard time telling our two planets apart, except for one thing.
The...
Fail better →
Zadie Smith:
To me, writing is always the attempted revelation of this elusive, multifaceted self, and yet its total revelation - as Zagajewski suggests - is a chimerical impossibility. It is impossible to convey all of the truth of all our experience. Actually, it’s impossible to even know what that would mean, although we stubbornly continue to have an idea of it, just as Plato had an...
The Comic Strip Doctor →
A (no longer updated) column holding forth about the ways various syndicated newspaper comics suck, by the author of Wondermark. There are essays on a bunch of sucky comics, usually full of stuff like this:
Rarely is there any depth to Id: the single joke is usually based on a broad cliché, and the drawings look like they were scratched out by a clubfooted chicken on the back of a vomit-stained...
Pataphor →
A pataphor is a meta-metaphor: a metaphor that extends from a metaphor, like a metaphor extends from reality. It’s part of the parody science “pataphysics”, which is a science two degrees removed from reality (if metaphysics is one degree removed). Related: the cuil hierarchy.
Example from wikipedia:
Non-figurative: Tom and Alice stood side by side in the lunch line.
Metaphor:...
“He was engaged in a serious search for the meaning of his own existence. And he...”
– From The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, apropos.
1989! →
Every writer on 1989 wrestles with an almost unavoidable human proclivity that psychologists have christened “hindsight bias”—the tendency, that is, to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at the time (for example, a Tiananmen-style crackdown in Central Europe). What actually happened looks as if it somehow had to happen. Henri Bergson...
Why Do We Dream? Five Modern Theories. →
When I saw this link (via azspot), it reminded me of a discussion a few weeks ago about dream interpretation. Mills felt that it was obvious that dreams are meaningful and can be successfully interpreted, while I remain skeptical that dreams contain any information capable of being interpreted into something useful (but not in total denial of the possibility), and, if so, that there’s a way...
Correlation implies Causation
An often repeated mantra is this: correlation does not imply causation. This is wrong.
In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume lays out his famous argument against induction. In particular, he writes:
It is confessed, that the utmost effort of human reason is to reduce the principles, productive of natural phenomena, to a greater simplicity, and to resolve the many particular...
Linguashmucks →
This is a translation of a post in and about Greek, specifically, about text speak and its not being the end of western civilization. I think it’s wonderful both for the insight into Greek and for the universal aspects.
Now, if you don’t get the joke, pull up a seat, and let me remind you of a thing or two about the Immortal Greek Tongue. Who knows, we might have a laugh together.
...
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is...”
– Vladimir Nabokov.
Do we view “the prenatal abyss” with such calm simply because it’s past, or is it more existentially troubling to have existed and then disappear than it is to have never existed in the first place? In other words, is our fear of our own nonexistence, or of...
There’s an Ampersand Mountain in New York State, which “takes its name from nearby Ampersand Creek, so named because it twists and turns like the ampersand symbol.” Sadly, I can’t find any pictures of Ampersand Creek, but now I’m really curious.
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, someone once said. It’s one of those quotes that everyone said, but it doesn’t matter who first uttered it. The question is whether you can talk about one medium through another, and if so, how. An even deeper question is: what’s the use of different media, anyway? Why don’t we just stick with writing, or music, or...
Designer Blogs
Magazines and newspapers have had three hundred years to figure out the balance between content and form. Some of them still don’t get it. Some of them do. One of the many reasons I like magazines is the way they allow form and content to influence each other. Magazines usually contain different kinds of articles, some short, some long, some serious, some not, some heavily visual, some...
“If you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street,...”
– Andy Warhol.
