Ah, a new website. Sort of like stretching in a new apartment, only not nearly as expensive, and perhaps not quite as satisfying. As you'll find out if you attempt rudimentary navigation, it is still woefully incomplete, but the content is around, waiting to be put in its propre place. Some area names have remained constant from the old place, others have gone away.

Over the next few days I'll be filling in the music and photo sections and the reading room with some nice contentstuffs, and importing a year and change's worth of entries from the old site into Movable Type.

Remarks on the name: the root noet- refers to thought, or sometimes consciousness. Autonoetic means self-perceiving. Another good word from it is anoetic, which is often used to describe a state of consciousness in which no thought occurs. I chose it partly because of my interest in rare and interesting words, and partly out of a fascination with the question of what makes us conscious, or "conscious" as a good philosopher would say, and self-perceiving, and whether or not we can bequeath these qualities to things like programs or web sites.

Tonight the boys of Honest Ben Jonson took in a show, marking the first time we've all been in the same place in quite a while. The performers were those powerfully honest, yet slightly deranged retellers of recent American History, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. Due to father Jason's neurotic tendencies, they only got through 6 or 7 songs, but they were good ones. Drummer Rachel was a very entertaining proto-Meg White; perhaps they should have cast her in School of Rock. Overall, about the most fun that can be had at an indie show.

The music section has been filled in with some lovely content, but more is on the way, so don't be looking at it now and then never again, or anything.

Some Japanese cartoons I've been watching, like FLCL and Read or Die, are created as serials with a predetermined and final number of episodes. After that, the idea has simply been exhausted. The story and the world are one, non-extensible entity. I think American TV, and music as well, can learn something from this. TV is an easy shot; how many shows that achieve any success end before the creators run out of ideas? I'll come to the exceptions a bit later.

As far as music goes, it is the great challenge to, with each record, explore new territory while still sounding enough like the same band that listeners have a place to start in absorbing it. More difficult yet is to choose fertile new territory, in other words to not suck. But I am amazed at the number of bands who continue to have patience for their own sound, without really trying much new, with very obvious deterioration in the quality of the work. I sometimes think some of the artists who had great beginnings followed by steady declines to mediocrity, did great early work almost by accident, and never really had the sense of what's good and bad that one assumes.

The reason we get these concepts overstaying their welcome is the business end: you've got to build the brand, and selling a new band by listing all the previous bands that had the same or similar lineup (often seen on the real indie levels, where bands don't last as long), is not a good way to accomplish that. Of course it's not just labels but bands as well, who treasure what fan base they've accumulated, and naturally fear starting all over by jumping name or style. And there will always be fans desperately wanting more, especially in cases of cult followings. But hey, sometimes the fans don't know what's good for them!

Difficult as it is, artistic integrity is vital. If the idea has been exhausted, so be it, and move on. It's harmful to disdainfully refer to bands as gimmicky or flash-in-the-pan if they respect this rule. Ideas have lifespans and theirs was short, no shame in that. It's much harder to come up with longer-lived ones.

To make this a little more constructive, I have a proposal. There can be two levels of band names: one permanent, and one that is different for each idea, or project, phase, whatever you want to call it. But this second level is still different from album titles, as there can be multiple albums under one project name (but not too many damnit!). This way you can keep the name recognition and gain the freedom to try new things that may win a new audience, and likely bring along some of the old one. And for those who don't like the new stuff, it's not that Band X started to suck, it's simply that I like their work on project A, not so much project B. This is a bit oversimplified, as new projects usually have mutated lineups and/or members of other bands, but it's a start.

Yesterday Gruff Rhys played a free solo acoustic set at Kim's on St. Marks. I have to say this, in combination with the previous night's performance at Irving Plaza with the full band, was absolute brilliance. The Irving show was the complete experience, with all the mind-blowing sounds, great videos on the projection screen, mutated arrangements, and incomprehensible stage banter. It was lacking only in songs from before the band's last two albums. Gruff made up for that and then some at Kim's, playing mostly requests in a subdued and beautiful tone. His voice, though worn by the previous night's carousing (the band's last night in the US), was ethereal and delicate as ever. Songs I am incredibly glad I got to hear include Northern Lights, Gathering Moss, Nythod Cacwn, Demons, and Fire in My Heart. For a finale he led us in a lively traditional Welsh singalong about finding sheep on the mountain.

Afterward I mentioned to Gruff that I plan to get a Welsh book this holiday season and study the language, partly to have something to say to him and partly to give myself a reason to actually do it. He gave me a brief lesson, that in pretty much any situation you can say (and I highly doubt I'm spelling this correctly) "yown." It's like everything's good, or ok, and such. Good guy, Gruff.

As I begin to think about my own apartment in New York, I'm getting an uneasy feeling. Part of it is that this is the first time I'm moving for an indefinite period, so the stakes seem much higher, even if it's not necessarily permanent. The other part is wondering whether I ever belonged in Manhattan, if having grown up here somehow entitles me to keep living here whatever the ridiculous price. Sometimes I feel as though I'm hanging off Manhattan, only here in limbo, waiting to be cast off into another world (which is about what the other boroughs are to me). After that I'll never be here for just a casual walk, but only when I have enough of a destination to cross a river to get here. The fact that I work in the nothernmost building on the island only contributes to this impression.

I reassure myself by thinking I will get so wrapped up in my various projects that it will hardly matter where I am, as long as I have enough space, can play music reasonably loud, and my commute isn't terrible. Along with this has come the realization that a conventionally "nice" apartment really isn't for me at this point--in fact, hardwood floors and plaster tend to produce awful acoustics.

I've also been working on some ideas for getting the most out of my space. The most important one is, do I really need both a couch and a bed? Definitely not, if I have the right couch. The second one is, hanging little storage spaces from the ceiling. Particularly if my ceilings are high enough that this doesn't make navigation difficult, it could be really cool.

That's about all I have right now. I'm currently looking to get back into electronics, and for ideas about projects that could make for a cool "pad" in the parlance of our times.

Someone brought up an interesting point during an argument yesterday. They accused me of disrespecting my belongings by leaving them lying around in disarray. I said this was ridiculous, that things don't mean anything, I'm not ethically bound to respect them. My accuser said, if they don't mean anything then why do I have them? Am I being inconsistent?

Like a good annoying philosopher should say, it all depends on definitions. There's nothing in my definition of 'to mean nothing' that indicates one shouldn't have such things, but then again I'm not sure what my definition really is. Perhaps I should have used different wording and just wanted to sound Eastern; all I really meant was, apart from the financial concern if they get damaged and have to be replaced, I see no reason to "respect" my things. Yeah.

When I first got going with my new bank account here, they seemed to send me a new statement rougly every two days. There were even separate ones for savings and checking. Of course it was quite unnecessary, as my transactions were all simple, and the balance information was a couple of days out of date anyway. A similar thing was happening with my student loans: they sent me letter after letter laying out how much I owed, almost as if to rub in that it wasn't changing, at least not yet.

A little while ago I started up direct deposit for my paychecks, and direct debiting for my student loans. A nice financial revolving door, all I have to do is sit back and watch the balance rise excruciatingly slowly. Now this makes the bank and loan statements kind of important, so I can make sure the money's going where it's supposed to and everybody's reasonably happy. What happened? I've completely stopped getting bank statements and letters from the loan people. At first I was upset about this, but hey, if they don't want to bother me, so be it. But seriously, what the hell? Did they figure since I have direct withdrawal and deposit I must also have direct extrasensory knowledge of my balance and transactions? Do us all a favor, huge companies, and don't try to be smart about customer interaction, just try to be predictable.

The moral is, don't complain about an extreme situation, because despite appearances and logic, the only alternative is the other extreme, which is probably as bad or worse.

It occurred to me that in every political campaign I've ever seen, the colour scheme (as apparent in speech backdrops, stickers, and candidates' neckties, for example) is red white and blue, for obvious reasons. When one campaign feels the need to distinguish itself in this respect, it uses something like a deeper blue. Bush and Cheney did this, and it was probably my favourite aspect of their campaign.

So I think a candidate could win my admiration by having the blind, stupid courage to use a different colour scheme. Bonus points for loud or otherwise especially iconoclastic colours.

On another topic, card-carrying philosopher relative's review of Slavoj Zizek: a weirdo and wrong. I have not yet pressed him on how exactly he is wrong; no need for debate on the weirdo part.

to the makers of the "Singer Smart Scissors" commercial:

You show your smart scissors cutting through what appears to be a pair of jeans like hot butter, and say it goes through "tough denim" with ease. But even though what they are cutting through looks generally like jeans, it is clear if you look at the seam where they have been cut after the smart scissors go through, that the material is extremely thin. So either these are a fairly convincing fake job, or the cheapest jeans in the world. I'm not saying your product is bad, although it's pretty unnecessary, but please, jeans are just not that thin.

to the makers of the Quizno's "Raised By Wolves" commercial:

This commercial was nothing great to start with. It had a certain nonsensical appeal, and it beats the average Subway ad (which isn't saying much), but the image of the guy suckling a wolf is not something I want to associate with eating a sandwich. But then you pulled the common maneuver of making a shorter version by cutting it down. This version is just a complete hack job that shows a clear lack of foresight that it would have to be made from the original. It takes out the explanatory shot of the longer one and leaves us with nothing of meaning, serving only to remind me of the unpleasantness of the original. Also, I saw the original, but some people might not have. The shorter one really should be able to stand on its own to some extent, and this one collapses like a house of popsicle sticks without Elmer's.

Finally, let's turn to the slogan of ifilm, which we hear surrounding each film shown on the Independent Film Channel. It is "the only place to see every film on the net," and it is wonderfully ambiguous, although since it is supposed to explain what they offer, it's not really that wonderful. The first time I heard it I thought it meant it was the only website of its kind, and its kind was a website that archives every film ever made. Once I went there I realized how ridiculous that was, although eventually something like that may come along. Now I lean toward the meaning, 'the only single site to see every film which is available somewhere on the net.' But it could also be, 'the only site to see any film that is available on the net,' i.e. there are no films anywhere on the net except there. Or 'the only site to do all of your film viewing on the net,' which doesn't really say much about their selection, just that it is compatible with your viewing desires. Now of course these aren't as likely, I'm just offering them to show the multitude of possible interpretations that make it such a crazy slogan. A whole new area of meanings is opened up if you question the meaning of the 'see' part. Does this necessarily mean seeing every frame of the movie in succession, with sound accompanying? Or could it simply mean seeing some aspect of it, even just a page that describes the movie, like IMDb has? The funny part is that of all these interpretations, none are actually all that plausible, especially if you consider movies that are traded on file-sharing services to be 'on the net.'

David Brooks's latest piece in the Times is a fine example of the Times hiring an idiot to be their new columnist, and that person showing himself to be an idiot by writing a moronic column.

The link I provide is sure not to last very long, so I'll provide some choice quotes.

"the Northeast is no longer a particularly important region of the country — we haven't sent a person to the White House in 43 years"

This is the measure of the "importance" of a region? Maybe that's because we're too big for the presidency, just like the Pope is "too big" for the Nobel Peace Prize, according to your last column. Yes, obviously Arkansas and Texas are the most important states in the country, since the last two presidents were born there. All that matters in a presidential campaign is where the president was born, of course!

"If a Martian came down and landed in the stands of a Yankees-Red Sox game, he would get the impression that human beings are 90 percent men and 10 percent women in tight T-shirts, and that we reproduce by loathing in groups."

This could be the most ridiculous statement in the column. If you take any social situation in isolation (except perhaps a New York City street), you'll get a bizarre representation of human demographics. And if you take any scene other than reproduction itself, you'll get a pretty odd picture of how we reproduce. That is, assuming you are a Martian who takes any situation to be an act of reproduction. This is an attempt at humour, but with nothing to back it up, it's just plain stupid.

"We know that our region is not the future. Every year, people move out of the Northeast to Scottsdale and other places where it is considered fashionable to coordinate your toenail polish with the color scheme of your Lexus."

What a utopia! How I have longed for a society with such priorities as these! Taken purely literally this statement is probably true, but that's about all. Suburban sprawl may be extant, but I'd wager there are still plenty more people who would like to move to the urban Northeast than would like to move away.

"during the game [the fans] experience long periods of contempt interrupted by short bursts of vindication."

Ah, of course. Everything that can be considered enjoyable consists only of mindless smiles. What you are seeing here is called caring, and being nervous about the outcome of the game. I'm not a big baseball fan but even I can tell you this is what it's all about, and even with teams that lose a lot, even the possibility of a change of fortune is enough to keep a hardcore fan going.

I'm so glad, Mr. Brooks, that you were able to survive the unbelievable boorishness of a baseball game to tell about it. How selfless of you to step down into this bog of society and report back to the rest of the elite so we know we're not missing anything. We northeasterners should really get with the times and start fighting wars, burning Dixie Chicks CDs and color-matching all of our beautiful belongings. And I do realize I'm to some degree confirming your argument, and sure, I do anger easily, at fools like you. Perhaps now that you are on the op-ed page of the New York Times, you should consider the concept of relevance when you choose a topic for your pieces. That's another thing we tend to like.

David Brooks, you suck.

A lot has been a-changing around here, so another meta entry seems justified.

First, all three areas of the site (other than the blog) have content, and more is on the way soon for the reading room and photo sections. The "slideshow" seen in the photo section is my first attempt at CGI programming from scratch, and let me just say this about programming when the only output is essentially "it works" or "it doesn't work:" I don't recommend it. But happily the script does now work, and is nicely general, although the coding style ended up rather terrible. Some New York pictures from a year ago, and the ones from America: the Tour, are soon to come.

All the old "Think of a Name" entries have been imported and given quick titles, but not categories. Don't be clicking on any of the internal links in them, you'll only be disappointed by the result.

Speaking of which, the old site has finally been taken down by Michigan. So if you haven't found your way to this site yet, this is a good time to do so.

The new thing I'm most proud of is the "random rare word" you'll see to the left. This is the first good use I'm getting from my dictionary of rare, archaic, obsolete and otherwise fun words, which I'll probably put up in its entirety soon. You can see a new word by reloading the page, so now you have a whole new reason to sit there reloading this page all day! Besides the other ones.

A few notes about the words and definitions. I've only provided information about pronunciation, part of speech, transitive/intransitive, and such when I thought it was necessary. So if you're confused about any of that, or the definition itself, let me know. Keep in mind that some of these words are old and rare enough that no one really knows how to pronounce them, or even what the precise meaning was, so you don't need to worry all that much about using or saying them wrong. Also keep in mind that the process of compiling these was one of much mental and physical fatigue, so my decisions about when to include such information were often rather foggily conceived. Thirdly, there were some cases in which I included the word precisely because the definition was so cryptic and crazy.

I was 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through my second alphabetic pass of adding words when I recently lost my umich OED access, so the dictionary is a bit topheavy in that respect. I will try to complete the second pass by Christmastime using other access.

Finally, by way of responding to comments, thanks to Milkshake for pointing out my omission of the Green Party, which I realized that afternoon but then fell asleep. The reasons for that choice may be obvious, but I still tip my hat to them.

Have been listening to and liking "Hail to the Thief" a bit more of late, but there's something in it that really bothers me. It's whenever Thom says the name of the song, especially preceded by "it's" or "this is." Examples:

"this is the gloaming"

"it's a drunken punchup at a wedding"

"I got myxomatosis, myxomatosis, got myxomatosis..." etc.

At first it sounded on at least half the songs like he was just mumbling for a while and then saying the title. The effect is lessened as I start to hear more of the words, but I still can't shake the feeling he's actually announcing what song it is. The real problem is when the melody isn't very strong, and the words don't have any context. That's why it doesn't bother me so much on "where I end and you begin" or "scatterbrain" which is great, or, well, almost all the other songs.

Also, what's with the alternate titles? They just kinda got pasted on there. Radiohead started the whole thing (well probably not, but I'm just a kid, I don't know history) of making every aspect of the album creative, by having these words and phrases everywhere. And in the OK Computer days, it seemed like they were part of the grand message. But these, eh. In fact, what they should have done was make those alternate titles the primary ones, and put the phrase he says prominently in the song in parentheses.

One more thing...the ending of "Sit down. Stand up." It's supposed to be really crazy and out of hand, but it just isn't. And the sudden stopping thing worked very well in live performances of "Idioteque," but there are so many other things they could have done here, that would have been better. This is part of a larger theory I have that the band are sufficiently afraid of being called bombastic again that they don't try anything really crazy, or let a song take a completely unexpected twist, and their sound has gotten thin where it once was thunderous.

Whew, perhaps I should have made a category purely for complaining. But this is the last one I have in mind for a while.

Singer Miles of Beulah, tonight at Bowery Ballroom, after turning on the house lights: "Interpol don't turn on the lights, do they? They're too busy checking their crease."
So take that!

Hearing that the Supreme Court is going to take up the case of the "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, I started thinking about this again. Usually when you hear people talk about this, all they say is it's ridiculous, outrageous, etc., to take the words out. One sentence in a Times article or so will bother to explain why it's ridiculous. The argument given is that the words have lost their meaning through rote repetition, much like "In God We Trust" on currency or "God save this court" in the Supreme Court itself.

Since my own anger at this subsided a bit, I've really been trying to understand how this argument could possibly be seen as legitimate in a court of law. First, one must grant that it's possible for a word to lose it's meaning in one context, but not another: after all, surely the word God itself hasn't lost its meaning, and if someone says something like "in God I trust," that statement itself also isn't meaningless. So it must be the rote repetition part that does it. But does that mean every other phrase in our pledge of allegiance, national anthem, legal proceedings, and so on, is also meaningless? Probably no one would make this claim.

So clearly there is no scientific method by which one can say that these phrases in particular have lost their meaning. The only other way to be sure about it would be if everyone agreed that saying them meant nothing, but obviously that is not the case, or this would not be a bitterly contested issue about to be decided by the Supreme Court! The mere fact of this situation is perhaps the strongest argument that the words have not lost their meaning, rather ironically. So it is purely subjective, we are simply being told that we should not worry about saying these words because they mean nothing, by the people who are fighting vehemently to keep them in.

It is important however to distinguish between the pledge of allegiance and the other governmental God statements, because some people say we should not take the words out of the pledge for fear that our currency would be next. I think a much better common sense argument could be made that the phrases on currency and in the national anthem have lost their meaning; I don't think an atheist would be as likely to object to their presence, or a religious person to their being taken away. Of course no one ever sings the fourth verse of the national anthem anyway. But there's something about the pledge, the fact that children are being made to recite it daily in plain speech, that seems objectionable. Let me say that things like swearing on the bible in a court fall into the same category as the pledge for me.

In a time when our president considers faith a very important part of policy, and a general makes statements about God being on our side in Iraq and such, and ten years or so after a president said he didn't know if atheists should be considered citizens, I cannot agree that issues of separation of church and state are no longer so relevant. Atheists may not be the most persecuted group in history going by total numbers, but adjusted for the total amount of people in each group, they probably are. And after a more careful consideration, I still find the "lost meaning" argument to be about the most nonsensical legal argument I've ever heard. So I will be very interested to read the Court's resulting writeup.

For the last few weeks I've been on what a coworker has dubbed the "six-day week" sleep schedule. It started when I had to reconcile leaving for work at 7am on Mondays to observe operations, with watching Adult Swim Sunday nights from 11pm-2am. First I tried some unusual approaches like going to sleep very early and taping it, then getting up at 5am and watching it. But then with the amount of work I've been putting into this site and my various studies, I just wasn't getting enough time in my weekends with such arrangements. Also I had to carefully arrange the rest of the weekend so that I'd be able to go to sleep so early on Sunday.

So here's the new approach: I go to sleep fairly late on Friday nights, 4-6am or so, and sleep pretty late, until maybe 2pm. Then Saturday night I pretty much stay up as late as I can, generally about 8am, and again sleep pretty late. If I don't get to sleep as much as I want, or if I'm otherwise tired at all, I sometimes take an extra nap for a few hours on Sunday afternoon or evening. Then I don't sleep Sunday night.

So far this has probably been one of my more successful sleep experiments. I'm always surprised by how quickly Sunday night goes by when I only have until 7am. And mostly I've been able to go to sleep at a pretty normal time on Monday nights, or a bit earlier than normal, which is fine since I often have to go in very early on Tuesdays as well.

Of course, I haven't mastered it yet, and I can't say I don't get tired during those Mondays. On a couple of occasions I have fallen asleep standing up in the room where they do things that start with "oper" and end with "ations," if you catch my drift. And I have reached levels of fatigue that cause me to question why I am still alive. This morning, while doing some programming, I had the thought that my code had been made vulnerable to bugs by a little girl while her father was giving her a bath. Yes yes, the bath, why hadn't I considered that before! Then again, on another recent morning when I got up very early after a decent night's sleep, I thought I was 'correcting' the lyrics on the CD that I woke up to, as it played. So as Jack Black might say, what's the diff.

I thought of this sentence last night: "Despite appearances, she's quite good-looking."

And now on to the real entry. When you really know a language, you have forged strong links in your mind between the sounds, or sequences of characters (depending on whether your memory likes to work aurally or visually), and the things they represent. One of the hardest parts of language learning is what we awkwardly call prepositions, because as my former lingustics professor said, they 'never quite mean the same way,' and they are extremely abstract concepts. For example, what exactly does it mean to be "on" something, considering all the ways that we use it? It's pretty difficult to come up with anything less than a list of different definitions, each with an explanation of circumstances in which it has that meaning. As a side note, consider the Sunny Day Real Estate song/album title "How it Feels to be Something On." Indeed.

Bear with me as I step into talking-out-of-ass territory, but the correspondence in Japanese is to certain of what they call particles (or rather, what they call what we call particles). Simply put, these are placed after words to signify the word's role in the sentence. Some are pretty simple, like wa, which indicates the subject of a verb. But others are rather strange, such as ni, which tends to be translated as 'to' or 'toward.' Some examples of verbs whose objects use ni:
iku 'to go' (the prototypical one)
kaku 'to write' (the person being written to is the destination of the writing)
au 'to meet' (the person being met is the destination of the action)
noru 'to board' (the vehicle is the destination of the boarding)
oshieru 'to teach' (the student is the destination of the teaching)
kariru 'to borrow' (the lender is the destination of the borrowing action?)

So in most cases some explanation can be arranged for relating it to 'to' or 'toward,' but in a lot of them we can not use 'to' or 'toward' with that verb in English, and some are truly bizarre. Of course, with the large number of homonyms in Japanese there is always the possibility of it being a different particle that happens to look the same, but I don't believe that is the case here, and I don't know if it happens much or at all with particles, since it would be very confusing. There's also the possibility that the Japanese idea of that verb is different from ours, for example that to a Japanese person, the action of borrowing has a 'direction' from the borrower to the lender. It could be that while we look at the trajectory of the thing being borrowed, from lender to borrower, as the direction of the action, the Japanese view the trajectory of the amount owed, which goes the other way, as the direction.

The other possibility is that the true definition of ni includes both what we translate as 'to' when applied to verbs of physical movement, and 'from' when applied to borrowing. This is fine, the only problem is it doesn't really get you to where a native speaker is, because when we say 'on' in English, we don't think of our whole list of meanings and uses. It seems to me that we do have some single coherent concept of what 'on' means, though it may be difficult to verbalize, that includes being on a physical thing, on a topic, on a task, and so on. So perhaps the best thing to do is simply present the verbs that use it and let the learner gradually form their own concept of what ni means.

As a footnote to these types of entries, I know that if a professional linguist were to read this, they would say that I am reinventing the wheel, and this has already been discussed in many books. This is true, though I have a minimal background in linguistics and am starting to acquire and read texts on Japanese linguistics. Of course if I am making my wheel triangular and really missed something here, don't hesitate to correct me. But regardless of the lack of innovation, this can only be beneficial to the language learning process, and perhaps to non-linguists who may realize the field has something more to offer than a sea of opaque terminology.

Douglas Hofstadter is an appreciator of lipograms, the most famous of which is La Disparition by Georges Perec, and its translation, A Void. For years I was periodically reminded of this book (or these books), resolved to get ahold of them, and promptly forgot the title again. Now I've finally read enough about it to remember the title, but still haven't read it. For those unfamiliar, this is the book that does not contain the letter 'e'. Anyway, it got me thinking about what you could perhaps call lipophones, although there's probably something better: songs or tunes that do not contain a certain note. I wonder if these would sound distinctive in any way. If you simply took the note out of chords, it would probably just sound thin. It might only work with certain types of tunes, meandaring scaling ones. Of course would only be meaningful in tonal music if the chosen note were part of the key the tune is in. Perhaps one needs to go to a level lower than the note to find the analogue of a letter. Is there a lower level? Well, maybe there's a good idea in there somewhere.

Does the phrasing "able to be done" sound strange to anyone else? Usually when one talks about an ability, it's a comment about the actor, not the object of the action. But it's right to say "breakable" means "able to be broken." But this is the ability of something out there (what isn't specified) to break it, not an ability of the breakable object...or is it?

Lately I've begun to notice a phenomenon that I also read about in Hofstadter, but was skeptical of at the time. When I'm working on Japanese, specifically when I'm trying to use it to construct original sentences (quite a struggle at this stage), and I can't think of a word, I tend to think of the French word for it before I think of the English. This may be an overstatement now that I think about it, because I still tend to think of the whole sentence in English before trying to put it into Japanese. But the fact that I think of French at all, when I haven't studied it or worked with it for quite a while, suggests that my mind has some kind of general foreign language mode it's going into. Hofstadter weaves a much more complex web with the several languages he's familiar with.

Wow, Elliott Smith has done himself in. This is really upsetting me for some reason. I wouldn't have thought he could make it this far and still be fucked up enough to do this. Perhaps something more detailed will come out about what was going on, if it was anything more than alcohol and drugs.

Yesterday I tried to craigslist a 19" monitor for $25 to replace my recently deceased one, and some "simplified Chinese character books" at someone's apartment sale. I went there at the scheduled time and announced to the intercom that I was there for the apartment sale. The conversation that followed can be approximated thus:

intercom: "#@ON HO@$#W"
me: "I'm sorry?" (wrong house maybe? definitely the right address though)
intercom: "$#@OU @$@*"
me: "...apartment sale"
intercom: "SO?"
me: "is it going on right now?"
intercom: "&^%OU I@#$ FA@%$#"
me: "I'm sorry, I can't understand you"
intercom: (over-enunciating) "$#@OU IH%@ OO FA@#$@"
me: (I'm in too far? That hardly seems possible, I'm not even inside) "...oh, okay"

At that point I gave up and walked away. Whoever was on the other side of that intercom was obviously getting more exasperated than I was, but not enough to simply let me in or come downstairs to explain. In these situations I always try to come up with an "at least," but about the best I can do in this case is, at least I didn't have to carry home a 19 inch monitor. I suppose it would have been wise to call ahead, but really, I can't be arsed.

I read something a while ago, who knows where, about evolutionary qualities of languages. The idea is that languages start with a multitude of competing dialects, and gradually the number is reduced as things get consolidated. Dialects may persist, but moreso in isolated areas--the more communication between groups, the more consolidation (the modern extension of this is that many wholly developed languages are being swallowed up). And the way things get consolidated is to some extent a process of natural selection. Some ideas for a language work well, others don't.

One example of something that might get lost in the shuffle for obvious reasons, would be a 15-syllable word to say that a predator is approaching. And we see this in modern times too; it's reasonable to say that in most emergencies there are a few syllables that will get the idea across. And it could be said that while natural predators are more rare these days, effective communication has become necessary for 'survival.' And even not in emergencies, it seems like the evolution of language is one of more and more contractions like 'gonna' and the elimination of things that are hard to say. It starts to look more like laziness, but it's easy to imagine that at one point it was important. Another example given was that words that must be distinguished frequently should not sound very similar, such as 'yes' and 'no.' These words, especially 'no,' are in reality quite universal, those sounds occur in some approximation in many many languages.

When I read this mystery article I had recently started studying Japanese, and I was baffled by how this language managed to evolve yes and no words. As far as I have learned so far there are three levels of such words for different levels of politeness. At the most polite level there's simply 'hai' for 'yes,' which is used for things like responding to requests from superiors. My quarrel is not with that word, which sounded pretty natural to me right from the start. But here are the other two levels:

less polite: 'ee' - yes / 'iie' - no
least polite: 'un' - yes / 'uun' - no

What the hell is this?! Of course it only makes matters worse that there are many other words in the language with similar sounds, like 'ii' - 'good,' 'ie' - 'house' (also 'love' I think), etc. But leaving that aside, I have to wonder how many discussions these words have inconvenienced or worse. As I've spent a bit more time with them, I can see how it wouldn't be so bad in face-to-face conversation. You can sort of shake your head and knit your brow as you say 'iie' or 'uun' and draw out the vowels, although I can't say if a native speaker would do those things, and technically each sound should always have the same length. But how about over the telephone? Well, that's just another reason the telephone sucks as a conversation medium.
Probably the old isolation thing can function as an explanation of how Japanese kept these confusing words. Then again, it is also known for persisting dialects that are incomprehensible outside small areas, but I don't know if any of these have other yes/no words that might have provided competition.
Maybe part of the reason it seems strange to an English speaker is that consonants tend to contribute more to the way we hear an English word than the vowels. Our vowels tend to all get squished toward the schwa, the 'uh' sound, which is the most relaxed position of the mouth. When words get changed, we tend to keep the consonants more than the vowels. For example, 'gonna' keeps most of the consonants in 'going to,' but changes all the vowels to the schwa (at least the way I say it). In Japanese it seems like vowels are perhaps more important to the sound, so while 'ee' and 'iie' might seem quite confusible to us, they're very different to Japanese ears. Then again, I've also found out that Japanese are known for moving their lips very little while speaking, so it's hard to imagine their vowels don't get squashed a bit as well.

P.S. The pronunciation of those vowels in Japanese is like 'tee' for 'i' and like 'eh' for 'e', and somewhere in between 'ewe' and 'uh' for 'u', but more toward 'uh'

P.P.S. This whole thing is actually pretty hypocritical if you consider 'uh huh' and 'uh-uh' in English. Where did we come up with those?

Assuming my usual place a few years behind the cutting edge of technology, I've finally obtained a digital camera. It likes to chirp at me. Since it has an ungodly number of modern options with cryptic icons and abbreviations, I actually read the manual. Some peculiar excerpts:

On the list of places to avoid using the camera:
"-places subject to direct sunlight"

No nature photography then, I suppose. They also recommend not exposing the IR Remote receptor, which is located on the front of the camera, to bright light. Right.

"The LCD monitor sometimes displays bright, dark, or colored spots at all times. This is not a malfunction. These spots do not appear in the photographed image."

Clearly the definition of 'malfunction' is quickly evolving. I especially like the "at all times" part.

Well I thought there would be more, but that's about it. There is some mild Engrish, the manufacturer being Toshiba, but nothing great. The printing is aligned extremely close to the spine, but that's much more annoying than amusing. It's actually a pretty good manual overall though. So let's talk about something else.

One of the surgeons at my workplace today asked my boss a question that I first thought was foolish, but later considered more carefully. They were talking about how reflection, absorption and transparency work at the molecular level, and the surgeon said "by the way, why when you look in a mirror is the left-right polarity of your body's reflection reversed, but not up-down?" My reflex thought was, there's nothing special about a mirror, it's just the same as if another person is facing you or if you turn around 180 degrees, that your left and right sides are in the opposite places (from someone else's point of view). But then later I thought, well if a person standing and facing you is reversed that way, why don't they also appear flipped vertically (essentially restating the doctor's question)? Then I realized that it's just as simple, because while they are turned 180 degrees horizontally from your orientation, they are not actualy flipped vertically.

My boss's answer to the question was simply that it's a result of the geometry of our eyes. I recalled that since our eyes receive information vertically flipped, with light from above hitting the bottom of the back of the eye, our brains flip the images back at some subconscious level. But with spherical eyes, shouldn't the images be flipped horizontally too? I can't see why not. So then the brain must flip the raw eye images both ways--in other words, rotate them 180 degrees. But in my memory of biology or whatever class this was taught in, only the vertical flipping was mentioned. And in the experiments in which image-flipping glasses were worn and the eyes adjusted after a couple of weeks, I seem to remember that only glasses which flipped images vertically were used. What would happen with horizontally flipping glasses? Probably a lot of car accidents.