2006

I’m sick (and oh-so-very-tired) of this clueless, absent-minded, bumbling persona of mine. I’m sick of knowing nothing about the rw (that’s the real word), of always getting lost, of always forgetting stuff, of never having my cell phone around, of people patronizing me, of stupid little mistakes like today’s. It’s time to start paying attention, to notice my surroundings, to stop forgetting in the shower whether I already shampooed my head or not. I’m becoming (to some degree at least) a worldly person as of this moment. This is my official skin shed of the silly-clumsy-absent-minded-professor-persona. So long.

Of course I’m fascinated with the Speech Accent Archive: a massive (521 samples) archive of English accents from all over the world! They put native and non-native English speakers to read the same sound-rich English paragraph, record them, and then painstakingly transcribe the reading to phonetic symbols and even point out error generalizations (it turns out Mexican poblanos speak with “final obstruent devoicing”, “interdental fricative to stop”, and so on…). It’s pure beauty  —though it’s a shame that there’s only one Mexican accent in there, I’m thinking of sending my own recording (they do accept them and even have some precise instructions).

Being childfree myself —well, I’m somewhat young to claim that title for myself but that’s the lifestyle I want to live and I’ve already considered sterilization— it was a nice surprise to find The rise of the ‘childfree’ in Reddit’s¹ homepage today. It was interesting to find out about Mariah, a Swedish girl who was sterilized at age 25; to read somewhere mainstream (The BBC) how much of a taboo the subject is; and to discover that there are actually groups lobbying for equality for people without children² (Kidding Aside is the name of one!). That said, the article itself is quite irregular, too short, and too focused on women (though I may as well be reflecting my own biases).

And I don’t quite agree with most of the reasons put forth in the article (specially not with “I can’t believe the amount of waste that children produce.”). My personal reason for shunning child-rearing is that it is usually a cop-out to the existence question. It’s an usually unthinking way to give meaning to your life, to feel like you’ve “done something”, to achieve transcendence. I respect if you consciously want your children to give meaning to your life and you want them to be your life’s achievement —me, I’d like to explore different answers. (That said, life span is so long these days that one may try to juggle several answers that were of yore mutually exclusive.)

² That’s one group of neurons I never thought would fire…

Yey! A playlist serendipity has brought me back Roy Vedas’s wonderfully weird Fragments of Life (its weirdness is a fact). If I remember correctly it was Pako who first showed it to me, late nineties, and I hadn’t heard it in years (old, how past starts to pile up). Anyway, it’s definitely one of my favorite songs. Here, enjoy.

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: