Having stopped observing operations very early in the morning at work, I'm now staying on the six-day-week sleep schedule mostly by choice. This is the schedule in which I (to use this weekend's timings) sleep from around 6am-3pm on Saturday, from 9am-5:30pm on Sunday, stay up all Sunday night and go to work Monday, and usually crash as soon as I get home from work, in this case waking up at about 3am on Tuesday, which brings us up to date (the idea being that I cycle back to sleeping at night as the week progresses and experience a week of 6 longer days).

Craving a burger, I headed over to the 24 hour City Diner. Unfortunately I was unable to avoid waking up my building's doorman on the way out, the door squeaking unpleasantly as I opened it. This doorman is quite friendly and has inquired before about the odd times of my comings and goings; this time he was utterly baffled. "You're going out now?" Just a meal at 4:30am, my good man, what's the trouble?

The burger was good, but the experience was marred slightly by the smell of cleaning fluids from the diligent mopping of the floors that was under way. The streets were among the emptiest I've seen here, and I was able to cross Broadway without interference.

Apart from the extra time to get things done, which sometimes seems huge but at other times negligible, my primary reason for staying on this schedule is that it makes things more interesting. When I'm on a normal schedule, it's a pretty regular rhythm, and besides it getting a bit boring, the rhythm is usually one of being unable to go to sleep at a reasonable time, then feeling bad about going into work at 11 or 12 or 1, and still having to leave in time for dinner. On this schedule who knows what's going to happen, but at least some of the time I end up getting to work at 7am or so, and feeling good about that, even if I'm reading the OED for the first hour.

Then there are the effects on my mind. Lately the incredible levels of fatigue I often endure on Mondays have produced some interesting effects. There are little time-warps, like the other day when I was going down to the cafeteria for lunch, and thought about how I didn't really want to take the stairs down the three floors today, but to be lazy and take the elevator. Then I realized that I was already downstairs, and had taken the stairs.

The other common manifestation of the fatigue is decreasing control over my own thoughts. Picture a nice little train of thought about the machine vision algorithms for the robot, chugging along nicely, "could use this measurement, as long as the images are consistent enough, etc..." And then another train comes barreling into it, sending everything into a new chaotic trajectory, "UNICORN PARKING RIP YOUR FACE OFF." What? What the hell did I just think? These occurrences are usually only mildly disruptive and a bit amusing as long as I don't verbalize them, which hasn't happened yet. I use all caps for the crazy thought because often it feels as though it is being shouted in my head. I experience a similar sensation sometimes when I try to understand what's happening around me having just woken up.

I used to like saying (to paraphrase as modern parody) that anti-sleep is my drug. But I was thinking on the way back from my 4:30am dinner that if that's my reason for staying up, to make life weird and therefore more interesting, maybe that's just as stupid as using drugs for the same purpose. It's less directly artificial, but it's still changing my mind instead of reality.

* * *
Getting back to my apartment after the night meal was interesting. When I got to the elevator it was on the 8th floor, and proceeded to make every stop until the 15th, whereupon it came straight down to the first, empty, and then took me to the basement, where no one was waiting. This reminded me of the artificially intelligent, speech-capable, and extremely depressed elevators in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy books, who absolutely loathed going up and argued with their passengers about the virtues of going down. Most of them simply sat in the basement and never moved.

Time for another language discussion that will probably be interesting to few. Yesterday I came across this brilliant little site, Japanese for the Western Brain. In fact it's a good introduction for any brain, and the first few sections have already given me many insights that no textbook would. The "numbers" section has an interesting bit about the redundancy of saying something like "three cats." The 'three' already tells you that you are talking about more than one, so why bother with the 's' on the end of cat?

To give the full context, Japanese has no equivalent of adding 's', so it's more like always saying 'three cat', except for one minor, yet not minor at all, detail. They have a concept called 'counters,' which are words that you insert whenever you have a number modifying a noun, that tell what kind of noun you are talking about. Most of these counters are for categories of things, the categories being defined in any number of ways, such as shape or size. And there are many, many of them. So to say 'three cats', you would say 'sanbiki neko', 'san' being three, 'neko' being cat, and 'hiki' (ignore the change to b) being the counter for small animals.

The above-linked site concludes that the Japanese system is much more logical and less redundant than the English one. It acknowledges that in English, for the price of redundancy we get the ability to say things like 'my cats' without specifying how many there are. In Japanese you wouldn't use the counter without a specific number, so there's no way to differentiate between 'my cat' and 'my cats', you'd have to infer it from context.

What the site does not acknowledge is that the Japanese system is really just as redundant, in fact one might say it is moreso. First of all, since the counters are only used in the plural, that part is still redundant. But now it's also redundant that we're talking about cats, or at least about small animals! The only logical reason I can come up with that such a thing would come into being, is to alleviate the problem of the ridiculous number of homophones. But if that's the case, it's one tiny freakin' band-aid. There are actually aren't any homophones for 'neko' so I can't give a humorous example of what a sentence about a specific number of them might be mistaken for if not for 'hiki.' And the dramatic sentence I was going to have calling on the reader to imagine if English were equivalent to Japanese in pronunciations didn't turn out so dramatically. But suffice to say, if I were designing a language, and there was a something of a homophone problem, my first idea would not be to create a whole other set of words that must be used together with nouns, when talking about specific numbers of them.

Anyway, just for stirring up such a discussion and actually daring to examine whether or not different grammars make good sense, without writing in the entirely separate language of linguistics terminology, I must heartily commend "Japanese for the Western Brain."

Another interesting bit to conclude, from the linguistics class I took in college. You may have observed that, for some reason, most of the English nouns that have the same plural form as singular are animals: moose, fish, deer, etc. A related observation, which I think goes quite deeply into how the brain thinks about language, is that when a noun that has a specialized plural (other than adding -s or -es) is taken out of its original context, the specialized plural goes away. For example, three instances of the animal 'mouse' are called mice, but what do you say when you see three instances of the computer mouse? 'Mice' in some intangible way, just doesn't seem right, to me at least. It's very strange.

This morning I incorporated a radio interview with Bloomberg about what happens when it snows into my dreams. I think lately, the radio has more frequently woken me up by turning off after 2 hours, than when it turns on.

Today I got together with old pal Mr. Mottel for some music playing. He requested we set up the old drum kit, which a few months ago was drawn and quartered, its limbs sent to opposite corners of my room. I was a bit nervous about doing this, recalling the veiled threats and fuming anger from neighbours when I used to play, but thought hey, um...screw them. To ease the burden for our fellow dwellers of the inside 'U' of the building, I draped a sleeping bag over one window, and a sound absorption blanket over the other (the first time I've actually used it). For a while Mottel played drums and I abused the guitar, with mostly incidental correspondence. Then we switched it up, still no problems. Then the bedroom door opened. That's odd, I thought, considering there's no one else here. It was a neighbour from the 16th floor; I had left the door unlocked and he had become desperate enough to simply walk in here to tell us "the walls are shaking." He was relatively calm about it, though obviously distraught under the surface, so I agreed to stop. Strangely enough, I don't think I've ever seen this neighbour before, and I wouldn't have any problem with never seeing him again.

What the last entry was really driving at, is that I need a place to play and record music, unencumbered by concerns of loudness, and if possible also by the hour of the day. I've thought heavily about it, and there are two possibilities, each with their pros and cons and neocons and libcons.

Possibility the first: install acoustic insulation in my own room so as not to bother the neighbours. At minimum, I think this would involve some kind of absorbent riser for the drums and amplifiers, and a whole lot of material on the walls and ceiling, and over the windows, and probably something on the door as well if I want to play when the beast is around. A couple of practicality cons are that it would be quite expensive (you can't believe how much people will charge for foam...it's foam!) unless I can be very resourceful, and be a labor and time consuming installation process. The other matter is that, certain higher powers willing (in this case the NIH and NSF), this won't actually be my room for more than a few months longer. While I could take steps to ensure that the materials would be largely reusable, it would still be a pain to transfer them to new quarters. At the same time, the biggest pro is that this is my room; all the stuff I need is here, and I'm not 'on the clock' paying for it. The other sub-possibility is to simply wait to do this until I am at a new residence; one which if I have my way won't require as much acoustic treatment to start with. But the time frame for such a move is completely uncertain, so this might end up being a 7 month gap until I can play music for real.

Possibility the second: either rent a practise room on a monthly basis, or by the hour for actual practise times. The first sub-possibility is pretty much right out financially, unless I could find about 20 people willing to share the cost, which is roughly double the number of people I know at all. By the hour is the cheapest possibility of all, and most places have a drum set and amps there for use. But I still have a lot of instruments I'd have to carry there each time. Then there's the fact that in this arrangement we would be on the clock, and might be on the verge of coming up with a great idea just as the hour ends. The other side of this is that a practise room has no distractions, unlike my room which is a veritable feast of them. Finally, if I wanted to do any recording in a practise room I'd probably have to re-acquire a 4-track, and then that would be more stuff to bring each time.

Why did I have to do music anyway? Couldn't I have been a writer? Writing requires so much less overhead. Also, by way of explanation, I have indeed for the past few years evaded this problem by using computerized drums. But I decided recently I would not do this anymore, unless for aesthetic reasons. It's just not right, it needs to sound real.

I wrote these just after waking up this morning, so if it seems like I say some things that don't make sense in a matter-of-fact way, that's why. I slept for almost 11 hours and although these dreams weren't particularly psychologically taxing, I felt very mentally fatigued when I woke up.

at summer camp: it is parent's visiting day. Mine are here. It is time for the big softball games. I seem to be part of Lipsky's Lancers. We go sit in the stands, and I remark about how lazy we are, that we're just sitting here chatting. None of the parents seem to have made it to this game. Eventually a counselor shows up, and some people seem to be playing on our field. The counselor starts talking about how the guy in charge of the game next to ours is an asshole. I go over to see what's happening. The guy in charge is pitching. He is standing in the outfield and throws a pitch so hard that it bounces off the backstop, off the ground and then right back to him and hits him in the chest. Unfazed, he picks up the ball and continues. Now he he proceeds to throw a series of pitches standing closer and closer to the batter, and instead of really pitching he is simply dropping the ball in front of the batter. After about three pitches like this the batter manages to hit one, and hits it right into the guy's chest and starts running. I find this whole display hilarious. The guy in charge of that game has looked dead serious, yet completely out of it, during this whole time. I go check out some of the other games (all the fields are adjacent) and they all seem to be pretty normal. Then I go back to chatting on our field.

Later in the games the guy in charge of our game tells me the guy on the other field has been replaced. I go over to see what it's like now, and the whole game is now taking place inside a glass case, something like an ant farm. The new 'guy in charge' is actually a series of tubes that deliver the ball to the batter, who is also inside the tubes. The batter is complaining that the tubes are designed badly and the ball is being delivered in a way that it's impossible to hit it, it never actually gets close enough.

Later there's some ceremony involving the parents, where some of the parents go up and talk about their kids. It takes place at a strange part of camp, a large field that contains models of the world's largest buildings. Among these is a model of several of the main Mormon Church buildings, which I find intriguing. I remember seeing the real things and wondering about how one of them was among the world's largest buildings, since it didn't look that big. Also these buildings look nothing like the real, real things--they are alien domelike things with a purple/pink color scheme. I start to approach these models to see if I can find out more. The models are actually pretty large, and have actual Mormons walking around them. The Mormons have robes with the same color scheme, resembling the Stonecutters from The Simpsons. The buildings have some strange names, like the "doctrine building" and the "building building." As I get closer, the patrolling Mormons start to eye me suspiciously, and I realize this is not a friendly place. They may just be waiting for their chance to grab me and pull me in somewhere and indoctrinate me. So I back off.

The parent ceremony is starting, so I take a seat near the makeshift stage. Pretty soon my parents go up, and my mother says some really embarrassing parent-type stuff about how great I am and such. I should be very embarrassed indeed since the whole camp is there, and I'm aware of that, yet somehow am able to really not care. It's actually not clear whether this occurred before or after the softball games.

at high school:
in the school's library (which doesn't look much like the real thing) I am having a little nap, leaning back in one of the chairs. I start to hear a few girls chattering; I am aware that they are the girlfriends of some guys that I hate, and are trying to get my attention and make fun of me a bit. I ignore them. Their chattering and giggling and taunting grows a bit louder. I stil ignore them. Then one of them comes up and kisses me. I open my eyes to see hers, quite beautiful. Then she draws away. The girls begin talking in a giggling way about how they'd like me to find for them a book, it's some kind of a combination English-Russian Dictionary, and history book about Stalin and the Cambridge spies. I know it well, having recently gotten it from this library, and I now feel strangely compelled to obey their request. Somehow I feel that they are holding me hostage here. So I go looking for it, but cannot find it this time. I spend quite a while looking, but all I can see is a version of the book that's German-Russian instead of English, and some other strange dictionaries. While I'm looking I see some videotape that I want, so I grab it. Finally convinced that the book I'm looking for has been taken out by someone else, I emerge from the shelves and find several of my high school friends sitting on the floor. They greet me. I tell them about how these girls are tormenting me and such, and try to see if they are still in the library by sneaking around various corners. They don't seem to be there anymore. I'm both relieved and disappointed, still wondering at heart why that girl kissed me, and go back to talking with my friends. They laugh off my talk about the girls, it's just another crazy thing I'm involved in. As we leave the library I become aware that it's the end of the semester, and everyone is getting all the books they need. Since I know they don't check out videos at this time, I leave my video on the ground right before the exit. Then I see that the guy in charge of checking things out is so concerned about people's desperation to get their books that he has an airport security-type setup. I worry that he saw me put down the video on his infrared or x-ray camera, but he didn't.

As we are about to leave the school we see something big going on. It's the annual book sale, a treasure trove of valuable and old books, and we had nearly forgot about it. As we go in there is some incredible frenzy going on near the cash registers, and we assume we must have missed the most valuable stuff already. Most of the books sitting on the tables actually look pretty new to me, but I trust my friends that there's good stuff to be had. Someone in our group keeps talking about how they'd like to have some cocktails; apparently that's another part of the book sale tradition. Then we pass one table and my friend Thom starts silently and frantically pointing at a stack of books, actually more like pamphlets made from a rough parchment paper, apparently by a cartoonist named Mark Meiske. It seems he's one of those well-known classic cartoonists like Hirschfeld, and this could be a valuable thing. I have an extremely hard time figuring out the price this is being sold for. First I see $89.83, and think wow, the sellers must be pretty well aware of its value. Then I see something like $3.89 elsewhere on the cover, and then a whole table full of prices like $31.89 and $29.something. I figure out that it is some kind of puzzle, and it says like something like, "if you subtracted the value on the left from the value in the table, you'd have the book's real price." As I'm figuring it out I wake up.

After studying Japanese for a while, I can read text in hiragana, katakana, and a few kanji, but I can't read it in the same way I can English text. When I look at English text, it seems like the transfer from symbols to sound to meaning (not necessarily true understanding, but at least at the word level) is almost instantaneous. When I look at the text, even without trying to read it, it looks like something meaningful. And looking at any individual word of less than insane length, knowing what it means certainly is quite quick.

One mildly frustrating thing about learning Japanese, or probably any language with a different alphabet, is that you don't even have this ground to stand on. Although I've noticed gradual improvement, when I look at a Japanese word I am still going one symbol at a time, except when it's a word I know pretty well and I semiconsciously expect to find it there, like desu at the end of a sentence. When reading kanji, I don't have to sound anything out, although recognition might take a bit, but a very disconcerting phenomenon is that sometimes I can know what it means without even being able to pronounce it! (Each character has anywhere from 1-8 different pronunciations, most have 2 or 3, there are many many homophones, and knowing which to use when is nontrivial.) Surely this is my own limited experience talking, but there's something very wrong about knowing what a word means without being able to say it.

The tradeoff for this struggle is being able to appreciate the beauties of another alphabet, in this case the largest one in the world. I doubt I would be saying this if I were studying in school rather than on my own, but I really take joy in learning the curves and balances of the hiragana, and trying to handwrite them well. What I'm finding is that, with textbook printing as my main source, I'm handwriting them the way I see them. But when I see handwritten Japanese, I realize this probably looks as silly as someone handwriting a's and g's the way they appear in print. At some point I should probably try to pick up P.G. O'Neill's "A Reader of Handwritten Japanese," but the hardcover goes for quite a bit.

Another comment on reading as a cognitive process: after noticing that I am sometimes able to read Japanese quickly if I know what's coming, such as that a Japanese McDonald's sign will say "Makudonarudo," I started to wonder if perhaps I am not doing something similar in English sometimes. It is certainly true that one anticipates things both in reading and listening, but do I still read every word and every letter or not? It's exceedingly difficult to tell, and probably varies a lot from person to person. I'm a pretty careful and slow reader, but I have occasionally realized that I mentally inserted a word into something I was reading that turned out not to actually be there, only realizing that upon further inspection. My boss is a very quick and impatient reader and probably relies heavily on anticipation of what will be there to get the full meaning, and does not by his admission look at every word.

Unrelated: I'm working on a memorization method that could be called the distraction method. I read the material I want to memorize, then intentionally distract myself, then see if I can remember it; if not, repeat. This is actually pretty difficult, sort of like Douglas Adams' instructions for flying: throw yourself at the ground and miss.

I've been noticing for a while that the economics of the cafeteria at my workplace are a bit strange, but yesterday it bumped itself right up to entry-deserving territory.

Like George Costanza, you might say the cafeteria is very...careful...with money. They have signs detailing their prices near the cash register, but most of the actual food items available are not listed. Instead, these signs indicate the cost for things like "hot water," "ice water in a cup," "napkins," "forks", "ketchup packets" and "empty plate." All the sorts of things you might think would come along with the meal. You can tell they're not wasting any money on the signs, they're plain printed paper taped up, with sloppily handwritten additions every so often. To be fair, I don't think they've ever charged me for my plastic fork, although I usually grab it after I've paid just in case they were thinking about it. I'm guessing the idea is to discourage some of the more economically disadvantaged patients from taking the opportunity to hoard all their dinnerware from the place, but can't they deal with that when it happens? Besides it's not like security's tight, in fact I sometimes stand at the cash register for a few minutes before an employee even shows themselves, so if someone really wants some plates, they'll get the plates.

The ironic part (you knew it was coming) is that although I get the same thing most days, a croissant and an orange Slice, and a banana if they're not too green, the price seems to fluctuate quite a bit. I haven't written down any specific figures, since that would kind of take away from the wonder of it all, but I'm pretty sure I've been charged amounts ranging from $2.15 to over $3. I rather doubt the price of croissants that come in plastic wrap is seasonal, so I chalk it up to employees forming their own opinions over time about what things cost, and possibly sometimes mistaking my soda for a coffee (it all goes in styrofoam cups with opaque lids).

Oh right, the yesterday part. Yesterday I was there bright and early when they have breakfast selections, which on average are even more unappetizing than the lunch ones. The color of the ham (at least I assume it's ham) they put on top of the eggs is nearest that of a pink highlighter. The woman in front of me was getting some bacon, and out of curiosity asked how she was being charged for it. "By the piece." By the piece of bacon....what a world.

Things like this make me think, that sometimes when we see how ridiculous things are in other countries, we fail to realize that equally silly things can be found in our own. Certainly there is an extent to which the collective philosophy stereotype of a people influences the way they handle everyday, universal things, but it's tempting to exaggerate it. Very tempting.... I can't help myself...

***

This bit is too self-promoting to get its own entry, but I can't remain silent. Today a photographer for the New York Times came to our lab and took about 3 rolls of pictures of us and the robot. She had a digital SLR but confessed she only uses it as a substitute for a Polaroid. Apparently a reporter already conducted an interview over the phone with my boss, and it's pretty likely they'll run a story, timing unknown but assumedly within the next few weeks. If I were a New York Times reporter, working on a story that was happening in New York, I think I would go to the trouble of actually taking a subway ride up and seeing the damn robot, but we're not complaining, and probably it won't be a very big story. We hope this doesn't preclude them running another story once we're further along in the project, like having a robot testing in an OR, because that will probably be even more valuable on the business side of things. But it would certainly be extremely valuable now in many ways, and needless to say exciting.

Later today we all went to the surgery department's Christmas party. There's nothing quite like a roomful of slightly drunk surgeons releasing colossal amounts of stress. One of them suggested we go socialize with the physical therapists; we ended up getting dragged into conversation with a guy who vehemently insisted we change our project to be robots that have sex (with each other or with humans, I don't know which) in an operating room, which he proudly called "ROBOT SEX 2005!!!" Later he kept walking by us and whispering "robot sex 2005..." The others told us they barely knew him.

The other day a coworker told me a great story about translation that I looked into a bit more. It's one that people love to cite as a poignant example of the importance of clear communication. But every telling of it that I found took a slightly different interpretation, and it's very difficult to sort out which is the most accurate, (at least without resorting to, you know, real research).

The basic story goes that the Potsdam Declaration was issued near the end of World War II as an ultimatum to the Japanese, to "surrender or be crushed." It was our last warning before using the bomb. It refused to be specific about the threat, but the Japanese did have some intelligence to tell them the threat was not empty (I'm not sure whether we knew that they knew). As a response the Prime Minister made a statement in which the definitive verb of reaction was 'mokusatsu.' It was interpreted as "we ignore the declaration" and the bomb was dropped nine days later. Everything beyond that changes depending on who's telling the story.

My coworker had seen a movie (not really a documentary, so potentially some elements were fictionalized, although it was supposed to show what really happened) that had a German professor translating the statement for Truman. He knew about the subtleties and ambiguities of the word and tried to explain it to Truman, but Truman chose to intepret it as 'ignore/reject.' The translator also apparently said something about the form of the verb that was used, and how it indicated that the Prime Minister was perhaps trying to subtlely indicate that he was uncomfortable giving a direct answer to such a powerful adversary ("as if you [Truman] asked me to comment on your shoes"), while saving face and his army's morale. There was also something about the motivation for stalling the U.S. being that Japan would have rather surrendered officially to Russia.

This page gives a brief account, and the main feature setting it apart is that it seems to place most of the blame for any translation error within Japan, saying that Tokyo radio said in Japanese 'we will mokusatsu the declaration and fight on' but remaining ambiguous about where exactly the translation to English took place. This scenario in general seems pretty plausible to me.

This page gets more into the definition of the word, and interprets it in a way that makes the outcome seem particularly unfortunate. It is telling the story in the larger context of the Whorfian hypothesis, which states that the language we speak as natives determines how we think and perceive; I can't say I understand the connection they are trying to make. Anyway, they offer as a definition for mokusatsu, "We are going to agree in due time with your demands; you know it and we know it; but let's both pretend that we have not yet agreed, so that we can save face by not seeming to cave in too soon to your demands."

This is a rather more thorough and trustworthy account that I just found, and agrees with another one from a book in saying that there are really two relatively simple definitions of mokusatsu, 'ignore' and 'refrain from comment.' The Prime Minister meant the second, but it was interpreted as the first, and then turned by American media into 'reject,' which is clearly incorrect.

Lastly, this page looks at the word from a business point of view and doesn't even mention the history behind it. I like it for that, since it's probably untainted by opinion about the war or desire to tell a good story. However, it's also possible that the use of the word has changed since 1945. It discusses the word as the name of a strategy in business negotiations that Japanese employ frequently. The negotiators simply stop the talks and sit with their eyes closed, or leave the room. As he says, the idea is one "of 'killing' the other party's case or proposition by letting it die in the vacuum of silence." (As I've been putting off saying, the literal meaning of the characters in the word are 'silence' 'kill'.) One can see the vague continuum of meanings forming, but this is certainly a far different intepretation than the one two paragraphs above, where they are simply putting off agreeing to the demands.

Now let's look at the word itself. As mentioned above, it consists of two Kanji, 'moku' meaning 'silence' and 'satsu' meaning 'kill.' It is technically a noun with the verb form 'mokusatsu suru' - 'to do mokusatsu', but oddly, the Japanese Web Dictionary I've been relying on only gives verbs as meanings: "ignore, shelve, smother, treat with silent contempt." These certainly seem more on the side of the business article.

I was initially a bit sceptical about the "we both know we'll agree eventually" interpretations; it just seemed a bit too perfect and ironic. And the more reliable sources that I found seem to support a slightly harsher meaning, although 'reject' is certainly not what was meant. But on a higher level, I doubt that a more correct translation would have drastically altered our world by preventing the dropping of the bomb. After all, the declaration was an ultimatum; there wasn't supposed to be a third choice for 'we'll take some time to think about it.' Ignoring it, refraining from comment, or anything like that really is tantamount to rejecting it anyway. I'm too ignorant about the rest of the history, however, to speculate about whether or not they really would have been ready to surrender a short time later, or to the Soviets.

It certainly would be nice to get ahold of the actual statement of the Prime Minister, if it exists as a document, to see if anything else sheds light on the intent, and what verb form he used. So far my cursory googling hasn't brought me that, although the Mainichi article linked above talks about something that comes closer.

Disorienting: waking up and thinking about the things I have to do, then falling back asleep and dreaming that I am doing those things, then waking up and falling back asleep and dreaming the same thing again, in a very realistic and convincing way, then waking up and starting to do the things I have to do, but not quite trusting that I am actually awake, and therefore losing some of the motivation to do anything, since I might still have to do it again when I really wake up. But that time I was really awake.

More site traffic studies: Last week the site traffic reports showed two odd patterns. One, I had hits from many colleges, but only a few from each; the entire Ivy League seemed to be represented, and the most were from Berkeley. Two, I had a lot of hits from google searches for "horrible failure," which appropriately enough I am the number one result for. The connection? A campaign, probably mostly among college kids, to make the president's official biographical sketch on the white house site the number one result for "terrible failure," which was successful a few days ago but now seems to have been 'fixed.' So, a simple miscommunication among a few idiots at each college, and voici.

Aggravating: Losing this entry after typing it the first time (excluding this paragraph) when a stupid blog crashed the browser. The author of this blog mentions how the body of a homeless person was found in a Japanese train station after lying there for 5 or 6 weeks. He uses it as an example of how cold and insensitive the Japanese are, that they probably walked by and just ignored it for so long. Dude, it's not the Japanese, it's people in a big city. If I walked by a blanket that seemed to have a person under it, especially if there were a foul odor, I would ignore it too.

What is odd is the seeming propensity for limbs of the Japanese to detach from their bodies. It seems like every other day there's a report of the arm or leg of a missing person turning up, with no sign of the rest of them. Perhaps they simply don't report on it here.

***

The other day there was a fire in a building about 8 blocks from my workplace that we could see from our window. The smoke looked lighter and more steam-ish than one expects from a fire, but there was definitely too much of it. Then I stood up in front of the window and noticed there was a fire truck parked directly below it. Then I checked the NY1 news site and saw that a firefighter had died battling that fire. The article didn't exist yet but the headline was already there. He was probably pronounced dead 2 floors down. It all seemed to happen very quickly. I felt nothing.

Mr. Fan has already provided a nice account of our weekend in Montreal, so I'll try to mostly fill it in with some personal observations.

On the way up we hit heavy snow in the Adirondacks, and it was not just heavy but in large flakes. At a gas station stop, I appreciated for the first time the intricate patterns of the snowflakes. For some reason I've just never really seen them myself before, always too much in a hurry or seeing snow more as a collective lump than as individual pieces. But the dark roof of the car, with a light coating applied while we got snacks, was the perfect venue for observation, and they were quite exquisite. I even found that I could watch the falling ones closely and catch fleeting glimpses of the shapes. When later a very nice flake fell on my coat, I enjoyed watching the shape gradually disappear as I breathed on it.

Walking around Montreal was indeed very challenging, as literally every sidewalk was covered with very smooth ice, and even patches of soft snow were a welcome reprieve. But I always enjoy seeing a city and this was a nice one.

In the language department, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Rather than having forgotten it, my ability to use French naturally in conversation actually seemed to have improved significantly since I stopped studying it at the end of 2000, the same time I went to France and had my first real chance to try it out. I believe that studying Japanese so much helped my French in a totally indirect way. This is in support of a theory of Hofstadter that I wrote about a few months back, that the mind has some sort of general foreign language circuitry that's getting exercised whenever you have to think with a non-native language. I heard more French than I had expected to, and understood the speech of the natives pretty well. I didn't have any deep conversations, but had a couple of meaningful exchanges that went smoothly.

There's also something that happens when I'm studying a language, where I somehow think that using it when I don't have to (i.e. with a friend who's also studying it but speaks English perfectly well, or in a bilingual place such as Montreal) is somehow tacky and undesirable. This is a really damaging perception, and I don't know the real root of it. The result is that I don't get enough practise, and when I want to use the language, with natives, I'm not good enough. But somehow, now that I'm on Japanese and it's been a while since I studied French, I've lost this feeling to some extent with French. I still felt weird about using it in Montreal when it was clear that the person spoke English, but that's because it's pretty embarrassing if I try to use French when I don't have to, and then don't understand something and have to go back to English anyway.

Oh yeah, so the trip. As Mr. Fan has told, but I will repeat here for context, we were stopped at the border coming back into the US and pulled over later, the first time our car searched by Customs agents and a drug-sniffing dog, the second time stopped ostensibly for a loud exhaust, then threatened emptily with the dogs being on the way. Both times it was made pretty clear that they expected to find drugs in our car, with no official probable cause for such a suspicion, but the obvious unofficial reason that we are young.

In a sense it was interesting to feel what it's like to be profiled, since it hasn't really happened to me before. Sure, they are just doing their job, and the only harm to us is inconvenience, although in this case the delay was a pretty bad thing with the long drive Mr. Fan already had to endure. I wouldn't say they treated us disrespectfully, except in the subtle way that our age and appearance (though it's hard to see how our appearance hurt us) made us suspects. But if this were to happen any more consistently than this possible coincidence, there would definitely start to be a sense of having to justify our mere presence on the road. In other words, what a lot of black people have to deal with every day!

Peter noticed an interesting feature of the Customs office that must be repeated. The counter had three large posters on it, explaining the Customs agency's purpose and duties and statistics in English, French and Spanish. Standard enough, but there was an alarming degree of difference between what the three signs said. The bullet points were largely in different orders, which didn't make much sense at all since it doesn't take a very different number of words to say the same thing in these three languages, so reformatting didn't seem necessary. But far stranger was the presence of a clause in the French and Spanish versions that was entirely absent in the English version. It read (translated) "We take our responsibilities very seriously." Peter interpreted this, correctly I think, as saying subtly 'don't bribe us.' To some extent it's understandable, since in many parts of the world bribing the authorities is still standard procedure. But as Peter pointed out, one wouldn't think it legal for them to put such differences between sets of signs that are clearly meant to be equivalent. So in conclusion, don't trust the Man.

P.S. Much thanks to Mr. Fan for his driving prowess and endurance in making these thoughts possible.

(an example of a Japanese personal ad)

Could we start a band together?

I've often wondered what logic goes into the romanization of languages that do not use our alphabet. The systems used for Japanese, the only ones I'm really familiar with, are straightforward enough and differ only in minor details that are not terribly confusing. But a lot of other systems seem to make poor choices and confuse us ugly Americans about how to pronounce words.

Of course the big problem is that every language has a different set of sounds, completely separate from the writing system. They share some, but fewer than one might think. Although we express all our vowel sounds with some combination using a, i, e, u, and o and do the same with romanized Japanese, the five Japanese vowel sounds are slightly different from the five English ones we align them with. Of course you don't need to know this to be understood in Japanese by a native, and anyway there are enough differences in how they are said by natives of different parts of Japan to make the truth very complicated.

I've always been puzzled by romanizations of Chinese. If the name of their recently deceased leader is pronounced closest to how we would pronounce 'Dung,' then why is it usually written 'Deng?' The avoidance of embarrassing puns hardly seems a sufficient justification. The question of 't' vs. 'd', as seen in the same name and also in 'Taoism/Daoism', and of 'ts' vs. 'ch' as in the brand name 'Tsingtao,' are also confusing, but in these cases it seems the Chinese sound is quite ambiguously between our two sounds.

Many of the Arabic romanizations I saw in an article this morning confused me quite a bit. How the devil am I supposed to pronounce 'Hajj,' if not the same as 'Haj'? Is 'niqab' any different from 'nikab'?

Certainly there is an idea of having the romanized version somehow look like the language it is representing, even if it is only because we are used to it, for example seeing q's followed by vowels other than 'u' and thinking Arabic. If the transcriptions were more purely phonetic they might tend to all look the same--then again, perhaps this isn't bad if it reminds us that we are only looking at an approximation of the real word.

Any other alternatives? Only ones that require a lot more of people than can typically be expected, like teaching everyone the International Phonetic Alphabet which is supposed to contain every sound used in any language, or having a legend to go with any article that explains pronunciations. In any case, since the answers to a lot of my questions could probably be found pretty quickly in a linguistics text or on the web I won't ramble on any longer about this.