Sorry about that -- I intended to post that to the Conlang Community page. However, since some of you may be interested in seeing a partial description of the Na'vi language from Avatar, I won't delete it.

I don't know what's going on with the links I just posted -- they worked yesterday, but today they return only 404s. However, if you go to Google and type -- "Some highlights of Na'vi" Language Log -- in the search box you can get to the article.

I don't know what's going on with the links I just posted -- they worked yesterday, but today they return only 404s. However, if you go to Google and type -- "Some highlights of Na'vi" Language Log -- in the search box you can get to the article.

Paul Frommer, the prof who constructed the Na'vi language for Avatar, has done a guest post about Na'vi at Language Log. Quite a bit of information, especially about the phonology. The post is at
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/p=1977#more_1977 .

Today I got a wonderful Christmas present from rsadelle. I forget when or where, but somewhere on LiveJournal (I thought it was a comment on a post by rsadelle, but a quick search yielded negative results...), I came with an idea for a cheap Christmas present. Specifically, the givee gets to specify something for the giver to read, listen to, or watch, and today, rsadelle game me just that!

I'm really excited, of course, but at the same time, if this person is your friend (and you wish them to remain your friend), you have a responsibility to not give them something horribly awful (e.g. something by him, him or him [oh, and I guess those links presuppose that I've chosen reading material, which is what I've done]). I can try to pick something I think rsadelle will like, but I'll likely choose wrong, so at the very least, what I've tried to do is choose something I love that I think will not be offensive.

And so, relying on one of my old standbys, I've chosen one of my absolute favorite authors of all time, and one of the greatest writers in the history of the universe: Virginia Woolf. And while To the Lighthouse may be her best, and Mrs. Dalloway may be her most famous, I've chosen the one I've read most recently, and whose status is, in my mind, the most controversial (in that I don't agree with what most people say about it): Orlando: A Biography.

So, rsadelle: Let me know, first, if you've read this one before (if you have, I'll choose something else), and also let me know if you'd like me to send it to you when I get back home, or if you just want to get it from the library. And thank you! This is just what I wanted. :) (Not saying necessarily from you, but I wanted someone to try it out, because I really think this idea has promise!)

In addition, if you will accept it as a gift, I would like to do the same for you. I'll read, watch or listen to anything you wish me to (provided it isn't horror, because horror movies scare me, but I figure I'm pretty safe there with you). You can include many of the series you watch or have watched, because most of my friends will have one or several on DVD, and I can borrow them.

Also, if anyone else reading this would like to spread this idea along, let me know! Just bear in mind with books that I'm a very, very slow reader. (I finished Dante's The Divine Comedy this past fall. I started reading it in the fall of 1997. That is no joke.)

• 23:03 Change is not immaculate, it's fecund. #

Having witnesed Princess Teacup while was performing eir daily, a-HEM, Twitter "business", you shall now be transformed into biscotti.

You can thank LoudTwitter for your current predicament.

It's taken me a while to remember to post this :-) W and I were talking as we worked in the garden. It's so very lush now, with plants that used to only grow small suddenly growing tall and thick, and small leaves turning into big ones. It's becoming a veritable (if contained) jungle. I struggled with the garden in this house for the first couple of years, just couldn't get anything to grow strong or robustly. But over the last couple of years it's really thrived, starting just before W arrived to live here.

And W said to me dryly "You know, that's not coincidence."

-sheepish look- Yeah. Fertility is one of those things when you're a plant mage/dryad type, really. I should have spotted that myself.

http://improbable.com/2009/12/21/bodnars-bra-size-does-not-matter/

http://improbable.com/?p=7803

Ig Nobel Prize-winning bra/facemask inventor Elena Bodnar explains and demonstrates, on Swiss TV’s “20 Minuten Online”, why size does not matter.

UPDATE: Dr. Bodnar will be appearing at the Improbable Research session at the AAAS Annual Meeting, in February in San Diego, and also on the Ig Nobel Tour of the UK, in March. Details will be posted on the Improbable events schedule.

Poll #1501556 Todays Poll .
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 104

Did you/Are you attend(ing) your top choice

The Truth. The Real.

The Moral. The Ethical.

I define Morality to be a statement of right and wrong based on a central idea. It is an intentionally simple, easily understood, and dualistic model of the universe. It is wrong: that is, it is false and untrue. More so, in reality, it is multi-layered, rippling out from that central idea into hundreds of smaller ideas for which there is still a right and wrong.

I define the Ethical as the personal reflection of the Moral upon the Individual. The Moral is a social more; the ethical is of the ethos. Inwardly, the Ethical is an acceptance of society's judgment on right and wrong. Do not lie, do not steal, do not kill. Outwardly, the Ethical is an imagination of a better society. The quest for egalitarianism, the current push for health care reform in America. Outward ethics are always critical; inward ethics ought to be, but frequently are not.

The Truth and The Real are more difficult to define. The Real is that which is of reality: a problematic definition, but one that relies on intuition. The Truth is not of reality. Let me say that again. The Truth is not of reality. It has never been so. Truth is the unreal real: it is that which we judge as mortal minds to be real. Truth is not experienced; it is believed. There is no such thing as scientific truth: there is reality, and there is a scientific description of it.

Truth is not for the Moral. Pairing truth with morality is disastrous, because it is so easy. It is convenient. Freeing morality to pin itself against any idea in any way it desires is what unreasoning faith entails. Without reason, the moral truth is unbound and conforms to exactly what each person wishes it to be. Find any majority, and you have found yourself militant preachers who convert by the sword.

Truth is properly paired with the Ethical. Truth is of the individual, but only of the individual. It cannot be shared, must not be shared. Truth is the standard by which morality is gainsaid by the individual, and it is the standard by which the individual demands society's change. Truth is what differentiates the Moral from the Ethical, because it changes the Moral into the Ethical by personalizing it, by making it personally relevant.

Remember: the most important fact of morality is that it is wrong. It is false. It is not true. Society is always wrong and must be wrong. Any large collection of people, on the scale of hundreds or more, is always wrong. (The chosen scale is based on Dunbar's Number.)

What remains for Morality is a pairing with Reality. This may seem counter-intuitive. Well, so is reality. So, indeed, is morality. The most surprising fact of reality is that it is often wrong. Humbly, we state that it is we who are wrong, and reality is showing us the truth. But truth does not derive from reality; truth derives from us. We, individually, have truth, and reality is wrong.

Perhaps you now say to me, "Michael, that is a dangerous way to think." And you are right. But we shall come to that soon enough.

Morality is derived not from truth, but from reality. Reality is composed of we ethical individuals, and it is by our collective shape that morality must be born. Morality must be a social more, and only a social more--not a truth!--shaped by the reality of our shifting opinions. These mores may be written down and enforced, or verbally agreed upon, or simply understood: that is for the individual ethicist to decide and to demand of others. If he persuades the many, then his truth is echoed into the moral fabric of that society: truth becomes reality.

So at long last, we have come to the idea of Power.

Power is the assertion of truth upon reality. It is a change in reality by the spread of One Truth. Dependence on reality for truth makes for stagnation; it makes for a pair of balanced scales tipping against each other with no winner. It is a game: a perfect instance of self-obsolence and exercise of boredom. When truth is derived solely from reality, and then reapplied to reality, there is a net change of zero. Those who live simply by the Real are powerless, subject to the whim and tide of the real.

But power is dangerous. It is always dangerous, as it must be. Why?

Truth, asserted upon Reality, is inevitably transformed. The Platonic landscape of our mind is no match for the tremendous inertia of the Real, and no matter the power of our Truth, it is never enough to survive intact. Whether this Real is merely another human being with which you have a persuasive conversation, or the land plowed to produce a crop to feed a village, our beautiful, idealistic plans never survive contact with reality.

Reality resists change. It resists Power. It is willing to change, but only in the smallest of increments. Step by step, power may change the world, but it is slow and it is hard. And it is inevitable. But this incredible inertia, meanwhile, is elastic. Push too hard, and it will give.. for a time. But the backlash will be all the mightier for it. This is the danger. The emphatic assertion of reality against truth is a shattering blow, the collateral rips across space and time.

This is Justice: the oft-violent reaction of a moral reality shoving the immoral back upon itself. This is what law enforcement is, what "balance" and "harmony" are.

Man. Sometimes, the sheer power of what I'm writing shakes me to the core. Couple that with the intentional effect of mood music and it's so intense that it hurts to just sit here.

Ah, passion.

One of my conlangs (which is as of yet unnamed) is intended to be a special-purpose pidgin which makes use of only a limited array of sounds. Originally it was spelled with only 15 letters (a, e, f, i, j, k, l, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, w). More recently I have considered the use of another 4 with limited frequency (b, c, h, y) for a bit more variety, though some or all may not make the cut. [I also considered, early on, using "h" as a sigh-like pseudovowel, but that might be problematic for some people and violates the semi-Germanic tone I was going for.]

Anyway, I have noticed that all of the words which I have experimented with using fit into just a few fairly complex but very restricted patterns; for example, 'jept' (which I have been using to mean 'gossip') fits perfectly within the "three-consonant" pattern whereas 'apolp' violates it in 3 different ways (the word starts with a vowel, L's never follow vowels, and P is used twice). Note that each pattern does not follow the same set of "rules". And that I didn't create any of those patterns on purpose, or at least not consciously - probably just an overzealous drive to give it a particular flavor.

( Read the other 5/8ths of this )

http://improbable.com/2009/12/20/anatomy-and-the-legal-system/

http://improbable.com/?p=8136

A lawyer performed an unusual kind of medical dissection, according to a report by WMCTV news:

A Memphis attorney has admitted to biting off part of a man’s nose during a confrontation at a popular Midtown restaurant. According to a lawsuit filed by Greg Herbers, Mark Lambert bit off and swallowed part of his nose during a dispute last June at Dish on South Cooper Street. Lambert is a trial attorney with the Cochran Firm.

The law firm says it “is dedicated to continuing the mission of Johnnie Cochran.” Cochran achieved international fame in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

So my innuendos about Cucumber have stopped being merely sexual and now seem to have gone to an entirely new level of entertainment.

First, the sexual bits:

Cucumber is long, hard, and good for shafting people.

And then:

If you slice it up and put it over people's eyes, it makes them feel pretty.

For those of you who don't know what Cucumber is, it's a Ruby-based Behavior-Driven Development tool. If that's not enough to give you some Google keywords, then you probably don't need to know.

• 15:52 Being sick is kind of like being very relaxed. I'm actually quite fond of it. #
• 22:55 RT @charles_merriam RT @EricaJoy: Techie in Bay Area lookin 4 new gig? Join @HackerDojo for "Hacker Fair" on 1/16/10 from 10am-1pm. #

Having witnesed Princess Teacup while was performing eir daily, a-HEM, Twitter "business", you shall now be transformed into biscotti.

You can thank LoudTwitter for your current predicament.

You know, given the fact that I now have three t-shirts I want to get, you'd think I'd actually get around to buying them.

But nooooo.

http://www.jinx.com/eve/men/shirts/gallente.html?catid=151&cs=2&csd=151&preview=1
http://www.jinx.com/eve/men/shirts/minmatar.html?catid=151&cs=2&csd=151&preview=1
http://www.jinx.com/eve/men/shirts/caldari.html?catid=151&cs=2&csd=151&preview=1
http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TO&Product_Code=QC-SCIENCEVERB&Category_Code=QC

I'd say, "if anyone wants to get me a Christmas present," but none of you know what my address is anyways, so fuck that. =P

In this day and age, during the waning of the Christian Empire, the shortlived revival of the Islamic, and the spread of castrated religions mutated into pacifistic idealism, we find it agreeable and conformant to say that words like "good" and "evil" are arbitrary and thus meaningless, that it is tyrannical to utilize these notions of "right" and "wrong", and that arguing for your own view is at least overbearing and offensive in polite company.

There is good reason for this. Many religions of the past adopted their more atrocious practices as part of the necessity of cementing solidarity and the unification of a human race just barely emerging from using the brain for nothing but survival. As a result, much of their original faults, upon review, can be discarded without great loss. It is nevertheless worth the historical value in understanding previous mistakes that we should be familiar with the ancient belief systems we are shoehorning: to take a reasonably well-known example, we know roughly why the Crusades and the Inquisition happened, and are more than capable of adopting Christian values without repeating those exact mistakes.

Morality

But morality lies at the heart of each great Western religion--from the tribalism of Judaism and Islam to the profession of doom in Christianity, from the unrepentant dominance of intellectualism in the Grecian mythos to the exhortation in audacity by the Norse, from Russian admonitions of Baba Yaga's attention to German fairy tales cautioning against forest magicians of all stripes (especially those Gallic-Celtic druids), and finally leading up from the Catholic triumph of universalism into the Protestant revolution in adherence to Scripture--each tradition is founded in a description of the world revolving around a central idea and its stark blackness and whiteness.

That's not to say such a description is accurate or correct. Since the Italian Renaissance, we have been a people obsessed with truth: only the evangelists of primitive Christianity cared or claimed such quite as fanatically as we do today, and I think it reasonable that there is not much difference between the two here. The declaration of Truth is the problem of morality: when put together, then you have tyranny of the spirit, not before. I'll return here in a moment.

Amorality

In our mass disagreement with morality, we naturally turned to the Eastern tradition. While the Western notion of the universe was a generally dualistic realm, Eastern ideas tended towards the question of the eternal and stagnant land around them. I credit this to the quicker imperial aspirations in each culture (virtually every Oriental group had an Emperor at one point) and thus the assertion of order over the land: a natural stagnater. You see the same thing in Roman religion: it is a continual reflection on rhythmic, cyclical sameness: and you see Christianity shift into a two-faced beast confronting the outsider dualistically and drawing up the placidic notions of a millenial kingdom in this period, amidst the dying throes of the Roman state. (See: pacification and the Matter of Britain and France.)

But this powerful idea of Peace, at the heart of a religion, as opposed to Morality, is built upon the need for unthinking obedience. The peasantry of each land never succeeded in overturning their imperial masters: at most, they broke away into little newborn empires: it was the invasion of the West that brought a true upset about. We, here, follow the same pattern. We are by and large a group of individualistic persons, and we are unwilling to dicker on points outside of actual human relationships, and those only because we are forced away from our natural individualism by the very nature of the topic at hand. Even Confucius, our Eastern moralist to our Roman pacifist, decided that his moral system would revolve around etiquette. Politeness! A good person is a polite one!

Individualism

Western religions have never been individualistic. They permit individualism, and indeed encourage it, but it does so in the same way that lights naturally create shadows. See the Book of Job and the myth of Prometheus, to summarize Campbell. By forcing people together in grand, sweeping claims, morality creates a bonding mechanism that supercedes the serene isolation of monastic peace with a cheerful strife. This is because morality promotes critical thought: in both senses of the word.

This is not to disparage peace. The remarkable thing about peace is that it does not care about truth: peace of mind comes more from confidence and an intentional focus of the mind than from any kind accuracy of information. Indeed, just as happy people tend to get more done, a grumpy person tends to have a clearer view of reality; joy must be founded on sorrow, or it is baseless.

An educated society must be moral, but an educated person must be peaceful: that is to say, a society needs truth, but individuals do not. Truth is a binding force that takes the place of governmental command and control: knowing who is in need and who is capable of filling that need, knowing when a need will appear and how to prepare for it: these are the two essential functions of government, and the two purposes of truth and fact. An individual, by herself, requires neither: they fulfill their needs and seeks their ambitions. This is the exact reverse of what we see today, which is the demand for a moral individual and a peaceful society.

Passion

Now, I've created a false dichotomy here between morality and amorality: passion is the third part of the triangle. Let's go over the three ways to look at this:

1) Peace is a pleasure, passion is a pain, and morality arbitrates between them.
2) Morality is judgmental, peace is tolerant, and passion is too occupied to care.
3) Passion is immediate and sensual, morality is rational and deliberative, and peace is transcendent.

Based on all I've said so far, the first is Western, the second is mostly New Age, and the last is Eastern. But this discussion isn't supposed to be about passion.

An educated society, as I said, must be moral and an educated individual must be peaceful. But you cannot simply be both at once: societies are made up of people, and if everyone is peaceful, then there's not much morality going on. That's difficult to reconcile, but it ultimately comes down to that antithesis of knowledge: time. Passion, by its nature, is a short-lived thing: it gets liberty, or it gets death. An individual, acting in the capacity of a societal microcosm, is a moral judge. Acting for himself, he is the oxymoronic peaceful savage. But acting as an agent of chaos and change, he is the kind of passion that gets himself crucified, hangs for three days gazing into Mimir's Well, and leaves the sea behind to take up the plow. An educated radical, therefore, must be passionate. He must be the storm of passion that whips across the peaceful and drags them down to earth, and the immensity of pain that upsets morality from its lofty, rational perch.

---

So, I'm not entirely convinced in this model, but I was thinking about it and it was too big for me to tackle properly by myself so I thought I'd put it out there for people to comment on. Surely I've managed to come up with at least one thing for someone else to disagree with here?

http://improbable.com/2009/12/20/authorship-whats-the-royal-rule/

http://improbable.com/?p=7860

How would Queen Elizabeth (of the UK) be cited if she were ever to do an unexpected thing like write a book? Psychologist Stephen Black answers this question, asked of him by investigator Beth Benoit. Black writes:

Interesting question. Lizabeth has not, but the Royal offspring and heir apparent has. Here are a few variant scholarly references I’ve found for his work. [H.R.H. = His Royal Highness]. No word on which, if any, is preferred by the APA.

H.R.H. Prince Charles. A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture. London: Doubleday, 1989.

Charles, HRH The Prince of Wales, (1989), A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture, London: Doubleday.

Charles, Prince of Wales, A Vision of Britain. A Personal View of Architecture, London, 1989.

HRH The Prince of Wales, A Vision of Britain. Doubleday, London, 1989

Prince of Wales, Charles. A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture (1989).

However, always helpful Wikipedia advises:

“when Charles uses a surname, it is Mountbatten-Windsor, although, according to letters patent dated February 1960, his official surname is Windsor”. This means that the correct reference must be either:

Mountbatten-Windsor, C. (1989). A Vision of Britain.
or
Windsor, C. (1989). A Vision of Britain.

However, Wikipedia notes elsewhere that as a result of anti- German sentiment, the name of the British royal family was changed from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor by Royal Proclamation of 1917. Thus, if we reject this subterfuge to hide the German origin of the British royal family, the correct reference to Charles’ book would be:

Saxe-Couburg-Gotha, C. (1989). A Vision of Britain, etc.

By the way: Recent news reports say that apparently the heir apparent isn’t.  The rumour is that the Queen is going to leap-frog over her son (picture it) and settle on the grandson, Prince Will, for king instead. It’s now been officially denied but then, they would say that, wouldn’t they.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/17/gibberish-rock-song.html

The funniest part about this is that about 40% of speech sounds like this to me.

You have no idea the sheer amount of will and effort it takes me to carry on a conversation in person. It gets ridiculously hard when there's distracting noise, going up to maybe 60-70%.

[edit:]
Given how much babbling (ha) is going on about verbal dyslexia, I wonder whether or not I have it. No. I'm almost certain I don't, or if I do, it's so mild that it doesn't deserve to be called that. If it was actually dyslexia, I wouldn't be able to force comprehension, I don't think. =P

Every year, Regret the Error publishes a list of the top corrections, errors and retractions from the English-speaking press.

I thought you might enjoy the award for Best Science Reporting, which went to the UK-based Daily Telegraph for the following correction:

Owing to an editing error, our report “Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists” (June 23) wrongly stated that research presented at the recent BPS conference by Sophia Shaw found that women who drink alcohol are more likely to be raped. In fact, the research found the opposite. We apologise for our error.