March, 2006

Neural nets are a popular technique in Artificial Intelligence based on simplified models of neurons and interneuronal connections gathered from brain research. Ray Kurzweil describes them pretty well here:

What hit me as I was reading this was how eerily close is society (as in human society) to a neural net. Think about it. Have you ever wondered how there are so many great and worthy causes being fought out there that you are not taking part of? You read, listen, think, and sometimes chat about them (you’re adding up the signals coming into you), but the signals simply do not exceed your (mostly random) threshold, and you don’t “fire”, you don’t act, your output is zero. (Street children and the EFF are the first examples that come to my mind, what are yours?)

Take me, for example: after many years of almost total political apathy, I’m close to releasing a web-app about Mexican Politics —in other words, I’ve become political (!)— because in the previous weeks several inputs conspired (somewhat randomly) to spur me into action. I’m an excited neuron in this weird, tragic brain that is Mexico and I only wish that I can get my next layer of neighboring neurons to fire.

Here’s a parting thought: media (and particularly ads) are the neurotransmitters of the hive mind.

The review itself is long and, though interesting at times, overall not that good, but there was a quiet, demure paragraph in it that kept me laughing the whole (did I say it was long?) review. Today I reread the paragraph in my notes and I’ve had a smile in my face ever since. This one’s a keeper:

To someone who dropped out of college and has argued along this lines to defend his decision, who has been playing with online reputation systems for a while now, this comment by Alex3917 —originally posted here in response to Paul Graham’s newest essay— was an epiphany, tying and explaining it all together:

Btw, have I told you about Schank’s Law already? I think not. Here it is in all it’s glory:

What would you do if you realized you had become a 21 y.o. petulant, cranky, old fart¹?

Golly! That’d be some positively nasty tidings² —or not. Would you rather not know? There’s nothing left now but pick up the pieces, apologize, and start over.

¹ I was on my way to becoming Melvin, from As Good As It Gets, wasn’t I? (Mel, btw, was so obviously a formist.)

² Specially if you thought of yourself as one happy idiot.

Here’s an excellent formist intro to international auxiliary languages^WP written by Eward Sapir^WP himself (one of the most influential American linguists of the past century) in 1925:

There are many, many highlights to be made. Here’s four

1. The “difficult and subjective concept” of the richness of a language, the “richness of connotations” (that phrase alone was worth the price of admission). This was precisely what I was getting at in my badly-received post On the Language of this Blog.
2. “It is true that English is not as complex in its formal structure as is German or Latin, but this does not dispose of the matter. The fact that a beginner in English has not many paradigms to learn gives him a feeling of absence of difficulty, but he soon learns to his cost that this is only a feeling, that in sober fact the very absence of explicit guide-posts to structure leads him into all sorts of quandaries.. The simplicity of English in its formal aspect is.. really a pseudo-simplicity or a masked complexity.”
3. His dazzling insight that the problem of finding an adequate international auxiliary language is really the problem of how best to “symbolize thought.” Wow. Just wow.
4. ”A common allegiance to a form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known.” ‘Nuff said.

Y’know, just between you and me, when the time is ripe—that is, in around 10 years—I would love to plunge myself in language: I would love to speak (and think in) Esperanto, Japanese, German, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Russian, Hebrew, Sweddish, Arab, Hindi… —Oh! Were languages not the harsh mistresses that they are! I’d love to work (and solve!) the problem of automatic machine translation (which, according to Kurzweil, will be the last task left for AI to emulate, the crucial last stepping stone to consciousness). I’d love to read both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. I’d love to construct all sorts of constructed and auxiliary languages. I’d love to write in Esperanto and join la movado. I’d love to become a Wiktionary super-freak. I’d love to write language textbooks. I’d love to create a compiler and write programming languages. I’d love (in a most masochistic kind of way) to be a professional translator and translate a novel. I’d love to study some serious linguistics. I’d love to do advanced algebra. I’d love to become a Lisp super-freak or, quite oppositely, think in assembly code. I’d love to understand Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. I’d love to work in the semantic web. I’d love to create software to help one read and absorb written information (we have software to write, word processors, so why don’t we have software to read?).

Oh well, please excuse the future lapse.

I used to laugh at the elaborate calculations and stratospheric numbers you always find when reading papers about the limits of computation —as in, say, “Just how much computations per second might the entire universe theoretically support?”. It was something more than my incredulity (it involves too much hand-waving at times), it was simply indifference. So what if the universe could theoretically handle one zillion jillions to the gazillion cps? We might as well ponder how many angels might fit on the head of a pin…

I read Ray Kurzweil answer 3 weeks ago and it hasn’t stopped resounding on my head ever since:

I must confess that I love Spanglish in a kitschy, campy, and yet honest kind of way.

It all started with Molotov and their ¿Dónde jugarán las niñas? album of my early adolescence. I loved their mongrel insults (”fuck you puto baboso!”) and their Voto Latino song:

More recently, a song by Yolanda Perez (featuring “Don Cheto”), Estoy Enamorada, has brought it all back to me:

Akwid, a recently famous group from Los Angeles, is a slightly different matter. Their music itself, for one thing, is something both truly different —mixing Mexican Pacific brass band with hip-hop— and truly good —the tuba “burping along like a nimble elephant.” But they don’t really speak Spanglish. It’s mostly just Spanish, but a different one from mine. One even more imbued with American influence.

They have a song called Pobre Compa in which the singer tells about a romantic triangle between him, his best friend and a girl. There’s a voice-over at the middle of the song in which the singer addresses the girl. One hears knocking, a door opening, and the following brief dialogue:

You can’t tell by the text, but the girl speaks her 5 words with a distinct accent that I love: crisp Spanish with an English cadence —which, btw, is completely different to gringo Spanish: broken Spanish with no cadence at all; an English tongue trying to mimic, unsuccessfully, Spanish sounds. And there was something else, beyond the accent, that I found interesting and appealing but couldn’t precisely pinpoint. I know now: it’s that “pienso que si”; a perfectly valid Spanish sentence, of course, but it feels somewhat unnatural to my Spanish sensibilities. “Pienso que si” mimics the English “I think so” where I would have more naturally said “creo que si” (“I believe so”).

It’s similar to the phrase “dulce para mi ojo” in their Taquito de Ojo song. That’s a quintessentially English phrase, “eye candy”, translated to Spanish inside a song with a quintessentially Spanish phrase as its title: “taquito de ojo” (“eye taco”). I like that.

Truth is, I love this blending whatever the language involved, I “delight in mélange.” Just to give an example, yesterday, via Diana, I found about a French Canadian group called K’maro and I was thrilled. They have true talent for Franglais, just look at this gem:

Or think about how “weekend” is now a French word. It’s much more natural to French cadence that the clunky “fin de semaine”.

With the above text, Richard Feynman gave rise in 1974 to the concept of cargo cult science: pseudoscience in which only the trappings of science are cultivated. He makes a beautiful point through it and you should read that speech of his, it’s really good. In today’s yoga class, as my mind strayed during a ridiculously protracted baloney preaching, I chanced upon an interesting twist to it.

First, let me confess that I fell in love with yoga since my first class. I love the elegance, the gracefulness, the relaxation, the concentration, the self-awareness, the girl in green (a classmate), the austerity (only your body and a towel), the small daily improvements, the personal challenge of the perfect asana, the beauty and harmony of many postures, the sensuality of some, the ascetism of others, the breathing, the exhilaration that follows a class. I’m painfully stiff but I know I will get better. I want to. But this love only makes me loathe more the other, dark side of yoga: the mystical b.s., the astrology/chakra/aura/spirit/numerology/energy mumbo-jumbo.

Today I endured a particularly severe sermon (~40 min.) in which almost every esoteric subject save alien abductions was broached. When I decided I had had enough—and, believe me, I can be patient when listening to cranks—I stood up and prepared to leave. The teacher understood, laughed somewhat sarcastically, and wrapped the class with the closing posture. I thanked her for the class and left.

I knew that yoga carried such baloney baggage before I entered, of course, but I enrolled despite it. As much as the pundits (yogis) say they’re an inseparable whole, they aren’t, and I’m only interested in the exercise, the secular part. The funny thought that crossed my mind today was that, in a way, what I want is a cargo cult yoga.

Click to see full-size.

Isn’t the “simply have a bit of human contact” part surprising?

(Parental Advisory: Some barely concealed nipples ahead.)