Do Not Disturb Any Further

Fun with linguistics: observations on "fucking" infixes

So there's this linguistic term infix, a middle-of-the-word version of an affix, which The Wiki tells us is "a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word". For some English words, you can insert an expletive infix for emphasis. Check out the discussion about using "fucking" as an infix, courtesy of Linguistics: an introduction to linguistic theory:

Yakuza game reviewed by real yakuza

Never played a Yakuza game, but it looks like Yakuza 3 is provisionally yakuza-approved. Great fun and really pleasant viewing layout for the article itself.

Closing quote:

Ironically, the sections that Shirokawa seemed to enjoy the most were cut out of the US version: mahjong, the sexual massage parlor, and the hostess clubs. After I explain to him what Sega cut from the US version, he said: アメリカ版を買った奴がかわいそうだ。セガＵＳＡが最低だね.(Translation: I feel sorry for the people who bought the American version. SEGA USA sucks.)

More word play fun

Courtesy of the BBC, their web site hosts a section called Your Say.

Check out the page highlighting tongue-twisters from various languages. Here's some of my favorites:

Spanish: Poquito a poquito Paquito empaca poquitas copitas en pocos paquetes. (Bit by bit Paquito is packing some wine glasses in a few packages.)

German (Bavarian): Zwischen zwei Zwetschgenzweigen zwitschern zwei Zeisige. (In between two plum branches [Zwetschge = Bavarian for High German Pflaume, plum] twitter two siskins [siskin = a type of finch].)

Fascinating Capoeira videos

Capoeira is one of the more mobile martial arts. Check out this collection of video demonstrations from an Israeli Capoeira group.

Here's a demonstration of the ginga, the basic form of the art. Make sure to compare the guy's different arm movements from the first few seconds and the segment starting at about 1:27.

More fun with words

So I came across a couple of fun sites where the authors explore word-y stuff, which I love. One discussion about how language, particularly spoken language, isn't "logical" like math includes this statement:

Language is something that we as a community of speakers collectively create and reinvent each time we speak.

A simple statement that covers the whole point of the article: Spoken language can be different in every conversation, but it still works even if it doesn't follow a particular predefined "logical" structure.

Go read more about words here:

Motivated Grammar, featuring unexpectedly down-to-earth commentary from linguists (What poor linguists' work have I been reading, anyway, that makes me surprised that a freakin' language expert writes something down-to-earth?)

Literal Minded, more fun with linguist commentary

"Hey Guys", a discussion about "guys" being a gender-neutral term (the use of which I wholeheartedly embrace) (Oh, but I can't bear not to point out that it's funny that the title of an article about word peeves suffers from a grammatical error. It should be "Hey, Guys".)

Everything You Know About English Is Wrong, kinda old but entertaining

I really should have squeezed a linguistics class or two into my decade of higher education.

Donald Kingsbury is cooler than I thought

I found a 1984 interview with science-fiction author Donald Kingsbury, whose Hugo Award-nominated novel Courtship Rite had a great impact on my wondering teen mind. Here, I discovered that Kingsbury is both older and cooler than I expected. Now I'm inspired to reread Courtship Rite.

Kingsbury was inspired to read after trying out H. G. Wells:

When I was ten, I hated reading — found it a drudge and a bore. We got all these stories about boxes that cranked out salt, filling ships which sank to the bottom of the sea. Fairy tales. What a bunch on nonsense! I wasn't interested. I figured maybe it's because they were only feeding us kids' books. I wondered what the adults were reading. The book I happened to pull out of the library was Seven Famous Novels by H.G. Wells. My mother had used to read to us from The Invisible Man as bedtime stories, so I knew Wells's name. After reading The Time Machine, I was hooked.

Kingsbury inferred WWII bombings before they happened:

Prediction is the key. In my first published story, "Ghost Town" [1952], I said man would be on the moon by 1965. My friends thought a thousand years from now, maybe . . . I bet all my friends in high school that we'd be there by '65. It's a bet that I lost, but not by much. You have to predict something that seems a little bit preposterous. It'll always come sooner than you think.

Let me give you another example. In the first edition of Willy Ley's book Rockets and Space Travel, he said he didn't see how Uranium-235 could possibly be applied to rocketry. This was before the A-bomb. I wrote him a castigating letter — me, a 15-year-old kid arguing with the great expert — saying of course you could apply atomic energy to space flight. Willy wrote me back saying he could not comment because the military wasn't allowing anyone to talk about U-235. I linked that with the fact that I hadn't been able to find any recent information on U-235. In 1939, everyone had been talking about it freely. I notice you've got the facsimile edition of the July 1939 Astounding in your bookcase there. The editorial is about U-235 and atomic energy. Suddenly in 1940 — boing! — all references to U-235 disappeared from the journals. Yet I knew they couldn't have just lost interest. My natural speculation was that a military project was afoot and, considering the complete silence, I assumed it must be a realistic, practical military project. They weren't thinking of using U-235 in the Third World War; they were planning to use it in the Second! I argued this with my friend Bruce Knight. I was saying there must be a secret atomic bomb project and we're going to drop an A-bomb on the Japanese very soon. He pooh-poohed me. We argued until three in the morning. The next day, while I was mowing my lawn, Bruce came down the street white-faced. "Guess what," he said. "What?" "You won the argument." "What?" "They've just dropped an A-bomb on Japan!" "WHAT?!" That's the way the speculative mind works. You pick up on detail. If you'd been alert, you would have sensed it in the air.

Kingsbury met a childhood idol, author A. E. van Vogt, in person during a delightfully geeky venture to watch a space-probe fly-by:

I decided to fly out to the Jet Propulsion Lab to see the Voyager Saturn fly-by. I noticed one of the people who was also going to go was A.E. van Vogt. I wrote him a letter saying I'd been a long admirer of his and I'd like to meet him. I told him anecdotes about how I'd been thrilled as a youngster by his stories and how I'd read his essays on how to write SF. He replied with a very nice letter. When I got to Pasadena, there he was watching the big TV screens. It was just like we were in a control room on board a spaceship watching Saturn go by — that's the way our minds work. I had a very nice chat with him and his wife and he invited me out to dinner. It was a delightful evening.

And the interview was done by now-legendary author Robert J. Sawyer, who's won the prestigious Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards. You can glean a bit of his background from this interview too.

Getting to Keats from Hyperion

I recently finished listening to the audio versions of Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos books. While I found the ending most unsatisfying, with lots of unanswered questions, I was inspired to do a little reading by the character based on John Keats.

The kind folks at Bartleby.com have a lot of Keats' works available. Go forth and enjoy the delicious word-play in Keats' own Hyperion (quoted below) and Endymion works!

Sample from Keats' "Endymion":

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:   
Its loveliness increases; it will never   
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep   
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep   
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.       
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing   
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,   
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth   
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,   
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways        
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,   
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall   
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,   
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon   
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils        
With the green world they live in; and clear rills   
That for themselves a cooling covert make   
’Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,   
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:   
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms        
We have imagined for the mighty dead;   
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:   
An endless fountain of immortal drink,   
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

Visual thesaurus: much to love

Speaking of fun with words, go play with the Visual Thesaurus. It's freakin' awesome.

Here's an example (guess where I got inspired for the search term...):

Fun with words: deuteragonist and tritagonist

How did I slog through a decade of higher education and never learn these words?

deuteragonist: second-most-important character

tritagonist: third-most-important character

Compare these with the common protagonist.

I was never one for reading the dictionary directly, but things like this tempt me. Wait, what am I saying?! I learned these through Wikipedia, the only source of info I'll ever need. Mostly.

More geeky fun: trivia about "Real Genius"

I love the 1985 film "Real Genius". While I was never as geeky as the science/tech nerds in that film, I still felt a strong kinship with them. Following a (geeky) reference from a (geeky) site, I ended up at a geeky treasure trove of trivia about the movie. I had no idea!

Check it out. Here's some tidbits:

"Smart People on Ice" is similar to a Page House practice, discontinued around 1974, called "alley surfing", where one of the corridors (cement-floored) in the house basement would be flooded with a thin layer of soapy water and residents would practice skidding down the hallway.

At one point when Chris is accused of being a "slack", he mutters "moles and trolls". In Techer slang, a "Mole" is a resident of Blacker House, and "trolling" referred to intensive studying (since someone who trolls too much never gets the chance to see the light of day, like a real "troll"; an alternate origin is suggested by the fact that hardworking physics students would have to spend a great deal of time in the basement of the Bridge physics building, and would thus be living "under the bridge" like "trolls" do).

The exam books in the exam scene look very much like the blue books used for many Caltech exams, particularly the cobra which seems to be on the back cover.

And now I'll forever been laughing inside whenever I see a reference to DEI:

The letters DEI and their lowercase Greek equivalents have long been associated with Dabney House at Caltech. The origin of this trigraph dates so far back that there is no hard evidence, only legends.

It is commonly reported that Caltech foodservice once had a dish which was eaten only by residents of Dabney House, and that the phrase ``Dabney Eats It'' was coined by foodservice workers. The same story reports that the letters FEIF may have been coined in response when some kind of inter-house contest was held where ``Fleming Eats It Faster''.

Periodic table showing elements' use

I sure could've used something like this in... what was it, middle school? When I learned the periodic table. Here's a handy chart showing images of how the elements are used. Courtesy of Top Cultured. (Warning: Visting Top Culture may lead to hours of time-wasting visual discovery and fun.)

Charming blog post about visiting the capitol

Check out this delightful, art-filled post describing the author's visit to Washington, D.C.

Then, for fun, go watch "I'm Just a Bill" from Schoolhouse Rock. Knowledge is power!

Speaking of Joss...

...see Joss speaking as he receives the 2009 Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism, sponsored by the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and the Harvard Secular Society.

Japanese eye-exam chart

Whenever I go to the eye doctor, I pepper him with whatever questions come to me as he does his exam. Since I've been going to the same place for nearly a decade, my doc has grown used to all this questioning, and he's always willing to share.

Last time we discussed how optometrists can test for color blindness deficiencies by having people sort a series of painted discs by color and shade; this can help better define the scope of a problem for people who have learned to distinguish colors by how bright they are. And apparently, those little discs are expensive, since their colored paint must adhere to a very strict palette.

I've also learned a bit about how they can test people who can't read, which often involves common shapes and symbols. (I forgot to ask my doc how he deals with deaf patients, but hell, there's only so many minutes per appointment.)

In a completely unscientific anecdotal way, I've learned that I seem to do better on the peripheral vision test -- which is pretty much a video game -- when I've been playing a video game within a few days before taking the test. It's like I get primed for that hand-eye interaction. Since I can see the video flicker on the monitor even when it's not "activating" something for me, I tend to hesitate before identifying a flicker from the test machine, because my eyes strain for something to move. But when I'm already in gaming mode, I'm more willing to just go for it and take every flicker as a signal.

And I also got my own take-home copy of a high-res image of the blood vessels inside my eyes. Can't find the disc right now, but maybe I'll post it later if I come across it.

I found this article about one type of eye-exam chart used in Japan fascinating: The doc can ask the patient to identify the missing segment in a circle. The patient is asked to indicate the position of the missing segment. It's deceptively simple. It seems to me that it's harder to guess for a circle than for the E chart I've seen used in the U.S.. And I bet it would make for a fun drinking game.

Small sanities: Seattle votes down plastic-bag tax

So some alarmist types are convinced that the Great Scourge of this decade just has to be grocery-store plastic bags. They're filling up our landfills! (Doesn't matter; we're not in any danger of running out of landfill room.) Contributing to litter everywhere! (Prove it.) Killing off marine fauna in devastating numbers! (Again, prove it.) Yep, that one kind of bag does all of those bad, bad things.

I dare you to try to find accurate, current statistics on all of the talking points on this issue. I'm not gonna do all of your research for you, but here's a start:

The plastics-industry-sponsored http://www.thetruthaboutplasticbags.com/facts.html site has more verifiable facts than the oh-so-neutral http://www.reusablebags.com site. The latter, for example, says "Plastic bags cause over 100,000 sea turtle and other marine animal deaths every year when animals mistake them for food." This statement is not just misleading, it's wrong (it's plastic debris, not bags) and was corrected three freakin' years ago. Not to mention that the explicit use of "sea turtle" handily brings to mind those cute, weepy-eyed, endangered critters that elicit lots of sympathy, so you won't notice the absurdly broad "marine animal", which includes brine shrimp and slugs and freakin' plankton, whose deaths-by-plastic aren't so, well, boring. Oh, and let's not forget that there's probably only a small percentage of animals big enough to think of bags as food, but any animal of any size could be taken in by debris. It's mighty convenient phrasing to focus the discussion on turtles and bags, instead of amorphous and less glamourous animals and debris.

The proposed solution to the Great Plastic Bag Threat is a $.20 fee on plastic bags. With a shitload of exceptions and rules.

I'll agree that plastics degrade disappointingly slowly. But so does everything else we throw away. I'll agree that marine animals are occasionlly being choked by plastics. But they're being choked by all kinds of plastics, including fishing gear and the now-infamous 6-pack rings, not just plastic bags. I will NOT agree that grocery-store plastic bags are the new DDT, nor that landfills are overflowing due to massive piles of unused bags, nor that a tax should be created because it's politically appealing regardless of a lack of evidence.

The proposed fee would allegedly "encourage" people to bring their own bags when shopping. Never mind the fact that paper bags wouldn't be subject to the fee. You know, because paper bags are made from renewable resources and have no negative effect on the environment... Never mind the fact that many types of bags and all non-bag plastics (e.g., the aforementioned fishing gear) would be exempt from the fee. Never mind the additional paperwork for retailers, or the poor schlubs who work the checkout counter and will get yelled at for enforcing the fee.

The most obvious point I can make about this staggering waste of time and money is that grocery-store plastic bags are already recyclable. Every Safeway, QFC, Whole Foods, and Albertson's everywhere provides a free recycling container in-store. But you don't even have to waste gas to drive to the store: 

The bags can be recycled with other allowed plastics in the regular recycling.

Read that part again. Then think about whether there's a single other thing in the world that you have to pay a fee for even if you're going to recycle it. (No, a bottle deposit is not the same thing.)

There are so many flaws with the original proposal, and the alleged "arguments" in favor of it, that I just can't list them all.

I am relieved that, for whatever reasons, Seattle voters soundly voted down this particular idiocy on yesterday's ballot.

Fun with science: studying affects of zombie attack

Finally, science is catching up with what we've known about the Zombie Menace for years now:

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.

From BBC News.

Make sure you're prepared: Learn about all things walking dead at the Zombie Survival & Defense wiki.

Grrr, argh!

Way cooler creepy than I've managed this year

A hobby I should take up:

...a guy in the parking lot after going to see Neil Gaiman during his Graveyard Book tour that had gotten him to sign a human femur. Apparently, he and his brother-in-law were putting together a literary skeleton, and they had gotten signatures from Alan Moore and Stephen King on different bones, among several others. A pretty awesome project, if you ask me. The guy was even handed Neil's cell phone while he signed the bone, and talked to his publisher, who informed him that The Graveyard Book had made it to #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List.

I've always thought that Neil Gaiman was cool, and stories like this just confirm it.

From a list of personal encounters with celebrities at Something Awful.

Cursing can be good for your health

A new study (yes, I know it's not nearly a large-enough test base, and it's not exactly a model of double-blind objectivity) indicates that swearing can help reduce the severity of pain.

Just enjoy the potential.

Fuck, yeah!

Fun with colors and words: hue, saturation, lightness, and blue

So I've used the hue/saturation/lightness color options in Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop and other programs, but I didn't know that the HSL model is actually 3-D. Check out the pretty pictures.

And linguistics is fun: different languages have different quantities of words that describe colors, but there's allegedly a pattern in the order they develop in.

Yay, colors and words!

Rice field art: screw crop circles

Making art in the fields without destroying the crops is better than crop circles.

See more pics:

• 2007 pics at Japan Times
• Start to finish at The Banzai Effect
• A Frogger tribute at Panoramio
• A variety of old pics at Pink Tentacle

And, if you're bored, go check Fucked Gaijin, my new favorite web address in the whole world.

Hippie kitsune

Reading about kitsune (Japanese fox trickster gods), I came across this description of kitsune possession from Lafcadio Hearn:

They eat only what foxes are believed to like — tofu, aburage, azukimeshi, etc.

I must believe that there were no hippies or vegans or other Western-style silliness when this belief was extant, because applying the hippie ethos to a trickster god just sucks all of its power away.

I already knew from xxxHolic that foxes allegedly love tofu, but it's just funnier spelled out so solemnly in print.

See this Hiroshige picture to remove from your mind any association between hippies and kitsune.

Why the Japanese history today?

I just started watching Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales. The translators took extra time to provide cultural notes so we gaijin could have some idea of the historical layering in these stories.

I'm looking forward to the third story, Bakeneko (ghost cat), which was expanded into its own anime, Mononoke. There's some simply stunning art out there for those stories. Makes my eyes feel nice.

Fascinating century-old photos from Japan

Okinawa Soba has a large collection of old photos from Japan up on Flickr. Many of them provide extensive background info, offering a look into the culture of the times.

You may not want to start with the intriguing Prostitutes in Old Japan. The background info is not for the faint of heart. My rage is ignited. (Disclaimer: My rage is easily ignited, regardless of the history or cultural background of anything.)

Examining some costs of anti-terror "safety"

From Daily Kos, via Bruce Schneier:

The Staggering Cost of Playing it "Safe"

(Capitalization is sic.)

Quote:

Since that day in 2001, every passenger entering a commercial airliner has been required to remove their shoes for inspection and X-ray. A precaution that is... massively, even breathtakingly idiotic.

Interrobang: getting the most from your punctuation

There's a punctuation mark called an interrobang that combines a question mark with an exclamation (sometimes called a bang).

It's totally non-standard, but I may just have to see if I can easily implement it with some of my more frequently used fonts.

Fun with symbols!

And, only marginally related, the word interrobang can be inserted neatly into the South Park Fingerbang song.

Rire jaune, the yellow laugh

A French phrase that literally means "laugh yellow", or "the yellow laugh". It's used to describe an insincere or forced laugh.

From an 1859 edition of Notes & Queries periodical, via Google Books:

What is the meaning of the phrase riant jaune? It is not explained in the Dictionnaire de Academie.

The expression rirejamu is descriptive of such laughter as is forced, feeble, and perhaps sarcastic. We find no explanation of the phrase in such French Dictionaries as we have consulted; but it is itself employed in explaining other idioms of a similar import. Thus, in Bescherelle, the expressions "rire au bout des dens, ne rire que du bout des dens, que da bout des levres," are explained "rire jaune, rire sans en avoir envie, a contre-coeur." Such laughter, then, as is described by rire jaune, is kindred to the "ris force-," to the "ris que ne passe pas de noeud de la gorge," and, in a measure, to the "ris amer," and the "rire urdonique" or "sardonien;" while, on the contrary, the expression rire jaune stands opposed to such phrases as "rire de bon coeur," "rire de tout son coeur," "rire de bonne foi." But the question may be asked, "What has yellowness to do with a forced laagh, or indeed with laughter of any kind?" Perhaps the idea may have passed into the French language either from the Spanish or from the Italian. In Spanish "amarillo" (yellow) is deemed in some respects, but especially with reference to the face and aspect, a very inauspicious hue. With the swarthy sons of Southern Europe, the wan complexion of death is yellow; so also is the paleness of disease. Viewed in this connexion, "rire jaune" may be regarded as describing what we call "a sickly smile." In Italian, again, giallo, or yellow, especially as applied to the common red wines of the country, is equivalent to sour; they turn yellowish when acescent. According to this view, then, rire jaune would describe the ungenial smile of a sour countenance, the laugh of that kind of person whom we call "a man of a vinegar aspect."

FDA considers reducing acceptable amounts of acetaminophen

AKA Tylenol. Especially when it's combined with prescription medications. That wouldn't be so bad on its own, except that Vicodin (hydrocodone/acetaminophen) and its generic counterparts all include acetaminophen. and there are no commercially available versions that don't already contain acetaminophen.

Conveniently, the FDA panel chose not to recommended that Nyquil and other over-the-counter medications containing acetaminophen be pulled from shelves or eliminated. This seems to be because they're claiming that prescription medications containing acetaminophen, or used in conjunction with it, have a higher incidence of overdose than OTC formulations. "Some panelists cited data that suggests that combination over-the-counter drugs account for less than 10 percent of acetaminophen overdoses."

There's not enough verifiable data right now in the news articles to confirm the statistics being claimed by the FDA advisory panel, but I'm going to keep looking. I'll also try to find some way to contact the FDA and tell them to stop the hysteria.

However, in the 10+ news articles I just read, not one of them cited specific statistics or sources to back up the claim that "most" of the acetaminophen overdoses are associated with Vicodin, Percocet, and related prescription drugs. I'm deeply suspicious.

If the FDA decides to officially change their guidelines about safe doses and combining acetaminophen with other prescription drugs, the existing formulations could banned, the manufacturers would have to reformulate all of their hydrocodone/acetaminophen medications, or people would have to switch to other drugs that might not treat their pain as well as the current drug.

Hydrocodone/acetaminophen is one of the most widely prescribed pain relievers in the U.S. It has been invaluable in helping me get through chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and post-surgical pain. It's a key part of pain management for several of my friends, too.

I can't help but think of this as yet another poorly researched scare tactic designed to restrict access to legal pain relievers because of over-hyped "addiction" fears and moral outrage that someone, somewhere, might be getting high.

Fun with words: anything can be a verb

Seriously. Particularly thing. The Latin word re means thing. Add a verb suffix, and you're gold. Reify = thingify. Amazingly, no one verbified this succinct beauty till the mid-1800s. See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/reify for the official definition, and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reification for etymological stuff.

I prefer thingify, myself, so I can have the ing hint of a gerund in the middle of the verb.

Yay, word fun!

Sticker fun at Unamerican

Srini always keeps it pithy at http://unamerican.com/. I like his recent setup for the new stickers: Click one to see a pop-up with a slightly longer message. Keeping Jeyen's cars distinct for nearly a decade!

Food, not too much, mostly plants

I've read too many contradictory, confusing, unscientific, and just plain silly books, magazine articles, and web articles about food and its effects to be even remotely certain about food advice.

But this is almost fool-proof:

Food, not too much, mostly plants

I've added my own mental caveats about grains (less is better) and protein-to-carb ratios (more protein), but on the whole I like this suggestion.

Yay, simplicity!

From Skeptic magazine, vol. 14, no. 4, 2009.

On a definitely related note, I considered not posting the above recommendation, because I was disappointed with the degree of research and proof offered for many of the articles in this issue, especially "The Origin of Eden". I have to recommend that you take this issue with a larger grain of salt than you should have to for a "skeptical" publication. The dietary recommendation, at least, has decent data behind it that can be verified without too much effort. For the rest of the issue, I resignedly conclude that I must continue to be skeptical even for skeptical information.