“languages”
53 posts under this tag.
Being a FeynmanWP groupie myself, his offhand mention in lonelygirl15’s NYT article piqued my interest and today I found that particular clip when she talks about him. BreeWP counts Surely You’re Joking Mr. FeynmanAM as one of her favorite books (I do too) and introduces the physicist with her trademark, inane teentalk we’ve all come to love and hate: “one of the smartest physicist ever, Richard Feynman… he’s really smart, like… Einstein-smart, like Newton-smart, like professor calculus smart.” But any comparison, of course, is in this case an understatement: Feynman was smart as in “as in Feynman-smart.”
Now, of course I had no option but to post a just-found formista quote that links conceptualization and algebra with genius to spare. I’m predictable and then some.
Conceptualization is man’s method of organizing sensory material. To form a concept, one isolates two or more similar concretes from the rest of one’s perceptual field, and integrates them into a single mental unit, symbolized by a word. A concept subsumes an unlimited number of instances: the concretes one isolated, and all others (past, present, and future) which are similar to them.
Similarity is the key to this process. The mind can retain the characteristics of similar concretes without specifying their measurements, which vary from case to case. “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.”
The basic principle of concept-formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity) is the equivalent of the basic principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given some numerical value, but may be given any value. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition.
Dr. Leonard Peikoff, The Philosophy of Objectivism: A Brief SummaryPDF
I shall read Ayn Rand soon, I can feel it’s just about the right momement for us to meet. (She surely is one polemical woman: there’s no shortage to people advising you against her and her massive—as in, it has so many damn references (~100) that it needs two-columns for footnotes—↓pedia↓ is currently protected until the bickering quiets down.)
From an Our Living Language note on the defintion of the word “like”A on the American Heritage Dictionary:
If a woman says “I’m like, ‘Get lost buddy!’” she may or may not have used those actual words to tell the offending man off. In fact, she may not have said anything to him but instead may be summarizing her attitude at the time by stating what she might have said, had she chosen to speak.
I enjoyed a birriaWP orgy this Sunday at El Chololo, a popular restaurant near ChapalaWP, and just as I was entering the bathroom two brown, impossibly small indian kids were chasing each other out of it. The (slightly) bigger one yelled to his mate: ”Kevin, ‘perame!” (“Kevin, wait for me!”).
I think it was a moment to amber, because surprised as I was of the Irish name having found its way into this beautiful brown boy, beacon of a brown new world, my surprise was really at how Mexican it sounded, how accustomed I had become to hearing such Anglo-Saxon names (Celtic Brian is very popular too) in young Mexican children.
Man’s achievements rest upon the use of [short] symbols.
Alfred Korzybski
 Wikipedia has become such a taken-for-granted, basic building-block (on the web and beyond) that I’ve taken a special hatred for the unwieldy, clumsy “Wikipedia article” epithet and similar unhappy permutations. I need more of the short sweetness English is known for: “email”, “web”, “net”, “blog”, “post”, “podcast”, “inbox”, or “feed”. Language is the ultimate interface (to steal an ALA title) and shortness does make a difference.
English GMail’s Sidebar
Spanish GMail’s Sidebar
I tried “article” and “wiki-article” but both are hopelessly general. Then I thought of being grammatically incorrect and use wikipedia for articles themselves—similar to the way we use email for the email address, the actual message, and the act of sending it: “email me an email at my email”—but it just won’t do. It doesn’t feel right. Wikipedia is so huge that the brutal metonymyWP feels jarring. Port-manteausWP were tried, but neither wikipedicle nor wicle struck any fancy.
The only path that proved fruitful was twisted back-formation. Wikipedia comes, of course, from encyclopedia, which in turn comes from the Greek phrase enkuklios paideia, often translated as “general education.” Paideia is a nice, short Greek word that means education and that is itself a derivation of pais, child. It’s perfect (with a slight respelling).
I propose we call a Wikipedia article a pedia. It’s short, has a nice ring to it, has meaning (“a pedia is a document for learning”), is memorable, and has a semantic link with Wikipedia (the uninitiated might think it a contraction and that’d be okay too). With even the pettiest pedia gradually refining into a massive, referenced survey (take the optimistic leap with me for the sake of argument), wouldn’t it be beautiful and inspiring if we could whisperingly call them “documents-for-learning”?
Did you know “thruthiness” has a pedia?
I just found an essay titled “Ambient Findability” by Peter Norville that seems almost like an outline of what would one year later become his terrific same-titled bookAM. The ideas are pretty rough and unpolished in the essay (or perhaps it’s only that I saw them first full-formed) but here are three highlights:
Google is undoubtedly having an impact on the evolution of the English language. I’d be surprised if the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary don’t have a secret threshold number of hits needed for new words to become official. “Blog” was recently added (3.7 million Google hits). I’m sure “Findability” is next (3,690 Google hits). Google is changing authority in ways we don’t fully understand.
As information becomes increasingly disembodied and pervasive, we run the risk of losing our sense of wonder at the richness of human communication.
And in the context of e-commerce, I’m fascinated and encouraged by the ability of customer reviews on sites like Amazon and Epinions to empower and inform consumers, increasing pressure on companies to build better products.
Interestingly, these reviews are driven by participation economies that reward the Top ReviewersAM with attention and trust. Note that the #1 Top Reviewer at Amazon (4550 book reviews) is Harriet KlausnerAM, formerly an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania. This just goes to show that librarians were destined to rule the Web.
This is from Douglas Crockford’s Survey of Javascript (never program JS without your Crockford!). I thought it quirky at first, surprisingly helpful later. (Emphases added.)
The && operator is commonly called logical and. It can also be called guard. If the first operand is false, null, undefined, ”” (the empty string), or the number 0 then it returns the first operand. Otherwise, it returns the second operand. This provides a convenient way to write a null-check:
var value = p && p.name; /* The name value will
only be retrieved from p if p has a value, avoiding an error. */
The || operator is commonly called logical or. It can also be called default. If the first operand is false, null, undefined, ”” (the empty string), or the number 0, then it returns the second operand. Otherwise, it returns the first operand. This provides a convenient way to specify default values:
value = v || 10; /* Use the value of v, but if v
doesn't have a value, use 10 instead. */
Short-circuit logical operators are a well-known, simple idiom in several languages, but they can sometimes be confusing to read, specially when nested. What I want to point out here is that next time you have to go through code that uses them, try reading them as guard or default, as the case may be. You’ll grokEE them immediately, trust me.
Isn’t it striking, the power of names?
As I said on a previous post, I believe Spanish, my mother tongue, has a low status on the web. And as I laid there pondering the subjectivity of my assessment, I remembered Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiWP’s fascinating account of how (and why) he became a scientist (it appears in John Brockman’s excellent Curious MindsAM, a compilation of similar tales by top-notch scientists and a sure recommendation to anyone).
The particular anecdote that came to mind was when he and a friend quarrelled over whose neigborhood was the more communist (the matter was relevant because he was living in Italy and the country was then in political turmoil). Their brilliant analytic idea to try to settle the question was to count out the circulation of the left- and right-leaning newspapers in each of their neighborhoods’s newsstands. This of course sent them into all sorts of interesting statistical considerations, but it put them on the path of finding the subtle answers to their question, and it was certainly better than “the hocus-pocus most adults rely on to bolster their arguments”.
So I want to try to do something similar with my question—what is the linguistic vitality in the web of 14 languages?—and this post will be the beginning of my investigation. For reasons of practicality and personal bias, the 14 languages I’m going to settle to are: EnglishWP, GermanWP, FrenchWP, PolishWP, JapaneseWP, DutchWP, ItalianWP, SwedishWP, PortugueseWP, SpanishWP, FarsiWP, ChineseWP, EsperantoWP, and HindiWP.
I had never before ventured inside the Wikipedia Statistics provided by the Wikimedia Foundation itself but it’s a wonderfully impressive place. Particularly interesting are its charts regarding all the language Wikipedias. It’s graph galore in there: number of wikipedians, active wikipedians_ articles, new articles per day, database bytes, links, words—you name it, and it all dates back to its inception. Not for the faint of bandwidth.
Ese fue un subtitulo de la portada del Publico de hoy. Para ser honestos, no suelo tener el menor interes por los deportes pero lo lei de rapido solo por aquello de enterarme de lo mas relevante del dia. Lo curioso fue lo primero que pense al leerlo:
...interesante, “festejo ganandole”, mmm, “festejo ganandole”, interesante, no es una forma que uno ve muy a menudo, por que la habran escogido? “festejo ganandole”, como mas podrian haberlo escrito? a ver, a ver, mmm, a ver, “festejo…”, “festejo ganarle al..”!, muy bien, ah!, “festejo al ganarle..”, muy bien, ya son 2 formas alternas, cual es la diferencia entre ellas y la forma original, en verdad difieren en significado? bueno, pues, si, creo que si, con “Atlas festejo ganarle al Boca Juniors” estableces claramente que el Atlas festejo por haberle ganado al Boca Juniors, con “Atlas festejo al ganarle al Boca Juniors” tambien dices que festejo por haber ganado pero insinuas que tambien tenia otro motivo de festejo, finalmente, con “Atlas festejo ganandole al Boca Juniors” no dejas duda de que aparte de festejar por ganar, el Atlas definitivamente tenia otro motivo para festejar de antemano…
Estoy enfermo?
|
RSS
email
Recent Favorites