http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2027

One of the things that I acquired over the holiday was a Talking Obama Figure ("Hear His Historic and Inspirational Words") from Gemmy Industries Corp. of Coppell, TX, "the worlds largest provider of all your favorite seasonal decor, animation entertainment and lighting products". This is one of a large number of other Gemmy talking toys, from the "Animated Talking Head Skeleton" and the "Gemmy Talking Dancing Hamster 97 Kurt Busch", to the "Dora the Explorer Talking Christmas Doll in Santa Outfit" and the "Animated Talking Bouncing Van of Love", and  Gemmy's monster hit from 2000-2001, "Big Mouth Billy Bass".

As you press of the red button on its pedestal, the Talking Obama Figure cycles through nine passages from president Obama's speeches. What struck me first about this collection of inspirational oratory was that it's performed by somebody else.

I noticed this because the performer, though he imitates the president's characteristic prosody, has a distinct South Midlands accent. Thus the first passage is from the 11/4/2008 Grant Park victory speech:

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there.

Listen to the Gemmy figure's pronounciation of get and I in this excerpt:

And compare Obama's performance of the same words:

This left me with several questions. Why did they use someone else's voice? Was it for obscure technical reasons, or because of IPR issues with voice that are somehow different from text, or what? And once they decided to use another speaker, why did they have him imitate the president's prosody but not his vowels? Was it because they can't hear the difference, or because they thought their customers would prefer a somewhat Texan version of Obama?

And most important of all, what is the connection between NASCAR driver Kurt Busch and a dancing hamster? This seems like a random selection from the cross-product of American memes, a process that might produce future products like the Talking Tiger Woods Lolcat or the Alvin and the Chipmunks Talking Dancing Mitt Romney.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2028

A Bizarro leap forward in animal abilities:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2026

In the lull between Christmas and New Year's Day, I read the droll news of a special parking lot for women in the city of Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, with spaces a meter wider than normal and painted in pink and light purple "to appeal to female tastes."

Today, Nathan Hopson sent me an article from Le Monde that shows pictures of this wondrous parking lot, leaving me even more in awe of the lengths to which the proprietors have gone to satisfy their customers:

The overhead sign reads nü3xing4 ting2che1chang3 女性停車場 ("female / women's parking lot"), rendered in English as "Women Parking."

Beneath that sign is another which attempts to be even more elegant: nü3shi4 ting2che1chang3 女士停車場 ("ladies parking lot"), rendered in English as "Lady Parking."

This Lady Parking area is located in a glitzy shopping center called the "Wonder Mall". It is truly a lavish establishment, with all the right name brands, as can be seen from these descriptions.

The BBC reports that "Official Wang Zheng told AFP news agency the car park was meant to cater to women's 'strong sense of colour and different sense of distance'", where presumably "different sense of distance" is code for the Chinese version of the "woman driver" stereotype.  So it's only fair to counter with an American woman's joke, which asks "Why can't <insert your favorite nationality, region, or university> men parallel park?", and answers, holding up a thumb and forefinger about four inches apart, "because they think that this is eight inches".

dachte

To briefly revisit a limited issue with postmodernism (spoiler: I think postmodernism is rubbish and the wrong direction to go from the fundamentally right challenges posed by relativism) and "X studies" fields (where X is gender, feminist, black, latino, or a few other things), I have a better criticism of Stanley Fish's criticism of Alan Sokal's prank. ( Read more... )

On a personal note, whenever we see papers, books, and similar that connect radically disparate ideas, we should be very skeptical, even if these ideas are fascinating or the authors brilliant/funny/nice. Yes, perhaps marxist theory and queer theory can tell us something about media consolidation, but more likely we have a few tame observations that cultural creation is becoming more open dressed up in very fancy clothes (if so, Lawrence Lessig says it better and with less questionability). Yes, perhaps cellular automata are teh sekkrit path to understanding all of reality, but more likely we have a bright guy with a few neat ideas who doesn't have enough people around him telling him when he's full of shit or unoriginal.

A further personal note - it's important to tell people when they're full of shit (or unoriginal, or both). It's too easy for people to decide "I will be original and brilliant", write their manifestos/books/etc, and not realise that their foundations lead them to reinvent the wheel for the 57th time, badly, and that there are also some rather well established criticisms for what they're trying to do if only they would look. I've had this happen a few times in my life - where I had to say "dude, go look up anarchoprimitivism", "libertarianism", "christian socialism", "turtle logo", "lisp", to someone who had essentially synthesised it themself (I've also had a number of "original" ideas that turned out to be not so original).

(note that saying "I disagree", "I disagree and find your ideas disturbing", "you're only half-right", "your criticisms are fine but your conclusions are poor", "you're full of shit", and "you reinvented the wheel" are all different things you might say - be sure it's clear in your mind which of these you're actually saying)

Largely unrelated, I am happy to see that Howard Dean is making a comeback. ( Read more... )

jcreed

*** wine-1.1.33/dlls/winex11.drv/mouse.c
--- wine-1.1.33/dlls/winex11.drv/mouse.c
***************
*** 518,527 ****
              {
                  case 32:
                      /* BGRA, 8 bits each */
!                     *pixel_ptr = *xor_ptr++;
!                     *pixel_ptr |= *xor_ptr++ << 8;
!                     *pixel_ptr |= *xor_ptr++ << 16;
!                     *pixel_ptr |= *xor_ptr++ << 24;
                      break;

                  case 24:
--- 521,540 ----
              {
                  case 32:
                      /* BGRA, 8 bits each */
!                 {
!                 char red = *xor_ptr++;
!                 char green = *xor_ptr++;
!                 char blue = *xor_ptr++;
!                 char alpha = *xor_ptr++;
!
!                 if (alpha == 0 && !alpha_zero) {
!                   red = 0;
!                   green = 0;
!                   blue = 0;
!                 }
!
!                 *pixel_ptr = (alpha << 24) + (blue << 16) + (green << 8) + red;
!                 }
                  break;

                  case 24:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2025

The little bird..Tweets to its mate a tiny loving note (George Meredith, Pastorals, 1851, as cited in OED2)

In my last posting, I reported on Lake Superior State University's 2010 "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness" (for the year 2009), but reserving tweet (verb or noun) for separate treatment.

Objections to tweet are all over the place. Some people dislike the word because they think it sounds irretrievably silly (with its echo of "When my sugar walks down the street / All the little birdies go tweet, tweet, tweet"). I don't use Twitter myself, but I think that tweet is an inspired coinage, suggesting bright, brief, bursts of expression (like birdsong) and connecting both phonologically and semantically to twitter; I might have suggested chirp, but it lacks those connections.

There are, of course, people who object to Twitter as a name for this service, on the grounds that it is itself silly — infantile and trivializing. Well, the people who created the service in 2006 (Jack Dorsey and his associates; see the Wikipedia page) got to choose the name for it; the rest of us don't get to revise the label.

(Compare Wii, which tons of people despised as the name for a game console when it came out, but the console has flourished despite this griping about the name, which for many people has now become "just the name for" the console, without any strong association to we or any of the senses of wee. People cope easily with homophony, even monstrous amounts of it; context and background knowledge make all the difference. In fact, I think Twitter and tweet have pretty much gone this route, largely unmoored from the avian metaphors that lie behind them; they're "just names" now.)

Then there are people who object to Twitter-the-service (as opposed to Twitter-the name). Their objection seems to be to abbreviation in itself — though it's frankly comical to see people who in other contexts trumpet the virtues of brevity objecting to a form of communication that enforces brevity. (The objectors' error is in taking advice meant, whether reasonably or not, to regulate formal written standard English in certain special contexts to apply to all writng, or even speaking, in the language.)

Which brings me back to the LSSU list, where one commenter on tweet pronounces, "tweeting is ridiculous". You can't tell whether the objection is to the act of tweeting — associated in some people's minds with frivolous young people and vainly self-promoting celebrities, as if these were the only groups to use Twitter, so that using Twitter is viewed contemptuously, since these groups are viewed contemptuously — or to the word (verb or noun) tweet. I can't even tell whether the commenter distinguished the two; words and things are so closely linked, after all.

There are serious defenders of Twitter as a positive good (as opposed to those who merely defend other people's right to conduct their own affairs in their own way, in private or in public, so long as they aren't harming others — taking offense is not the same as being harmed, by the way). See, for example, the lead article in the January 3 NYT Week in Review: "Why Twitter Will Endure", by David Carr.

Carr deprecates the name Twitter and the verb tweet:

In the pantheon of digital nomenclature — brands within a sector of the economy that grew so fast that all the sensible names were quickly taken — it would be hard to come up with a noun more trite [an odd choice of adjective; how is the name Twitter overused or lacking in originality?] than Twitter. It impugns itself, promising something slight and inconsequential, yet another way to make hours disappear and have nothing to show for it. And just in case the noun is not sufficiently indicting, the verb, "to tweet", is even more embarrassing.

But, despite his unhappiness over the vocabulary, Carr goes on to argue for the utility of Twitter, especially when you use various features it provides for managing the flow of tweets.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2024

It's the beginning of a new year, so Lake Superior State University has come out with its annual list of words (well, expressions) to be banished from English. (We've had brief Language Log postings on earlier LSSU lists — at least, here, here, and here.) Yes, it's a publicity stunt, and yes, it's a steaming pile of intemperate peeving (on the evidence of the comments selected for the entries on the site), and yes, the hyperbolic conceit of the site is that not only are the compilers declaring that they despise these expressions but they are proposing that everyone should be prohibited from ever using them (not that such opinions could have any real effect on what people do; the site is all show and no consequence.)

The villains are familiar: expressions that are, or are believed to be, recent innovations; especially those associated, rightly or wrongly, with young people (on chillaxin': "a made-up word used by annoying Gen-Yers") or journalistic writing or business talk; currently popular expressions, or expressions believed to be currently popular, labeled as "overused" or "buzzwords" (as if popularity was a curse in itself); portmanteaus (sexting, bromance, chillaxin', variations on Obama); and abbreviated expressions (app).

The substitutions commenters propose are often tin-eared or semantically deficient:

for the verb friend in social media: send a friend request or befriend;

for teachable moment: opportunity to make a point or lesson;

for czar: leader, coordinator, or director;

for toxic assets: bad stocks, debts, or loans;

for app: program.

I usually try to steer clear of sinks of peeving, because they are mostly just ill-informed recitations of contempt, but once a year I check in on the LSSU folks and their (fortunately brief) parade of bile (in part because their list comes out just before the American Dialect Society votes, in a light-hearted way, on the Words of the Year in various categories).

I'll post separately on objections to tweet (verb or noun), which made the LSSU Final Fifteen this year.

What are you going to do in 2010?

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3755

Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone by John C. Baez and Mike Stay, 2009.

In physics, Feynman diagrams are used to reason about quantum processes. In the 1980s, it became clear
that underlying these diagrams is a powerful analogy between quantum physics and topology. Namely, a linear
operator behaves very much like a `cobordism': a manifold representing spacetime, going between two
manifolds representing space. This led to a burst of work on topological quantum field theory and `quantum
topology'. But this was just the beginning: similar diagrams can be used to reason about logic, where
they represent proofs, and computation, where they represent programs. With the rise of interest in quantum
cryptography and quantum computation, it became clear that there is extensive network of analogies between
physics, topology, logic and computation. In this expository paper, we make some of these analogies precise
using the concept of `closed symmetric monoidal category'. We assume no prior knowledge of category
theory, proof theory or computer science.

I am not sure whether this should be categorized as "Fun" instead of "Theory", given that "We assume no prior knowledge of category theory, proof theory or computer science".

At least one pair from the title (logic and computation) should ring some bells...