Mad scientists?

I found this comic illuminating.

I used to respect the UN

WTF?

They urge member nations to enact legislation to make illegal the criticism of religion?

Not that I'm a fan of everyone criticizing everyone else, but this kind of crap is why people don't respect the UN.

Kings

Kings.

A Shakespearean Drama, with biblical intrigue and the technical sensibilities of Battlestar Galactica.

It's got good characters (and decent actors portraying them). It's a good show and you should watch it.

Work and Play

Susan Garnsey is a really awesome professor of Psychology at the U of I. When I was there I had the wonderful experience of being a lowly undergrad worker in her Language & Brain lab (I ran ERPs for a comparison study of Japanese and English on garden path sentences).

I remember one of those stereotype shattering moments in my early academic career when I was sitting on the couch next to Gary Dell and some graduate students at one of Susan's Parties. We were talking about some such crazy thing related to sentence processing when I looked over to Susan's CD collection and was struck by her musical tastes. I pulled out a copy of the Magnetic Fields' 69 love songs which spun the group's conversation into a totally different (and totally awesome) realm.

Suddenly, I was no longer in an intimidating professor's home in some nerve-wrecking conversation where, at any moment I was in danger of saying something stupid that was going to make evident how little my undergraduate brain knew about sentence processing. Instead, we were talking about the qualities of Stephin Merritt's voice and his multi-talented cast of friends, a conversation I may have been having with peers at some house party later that weekend.

I guess I should have probably taken advantage of my surroundings that day and maybe gained a little more insight on the wonderful world of psycholinguistics, but it was pretty cool talking about music with these people who spent a large part of their week lecturing to undergraduates like me and grading our homeworks, and doing cutting-edge research. In a very profound way, it made a carreer in acadamics actually seem within grasp. These people could be so well versed in the processing literature AND know about Stephin Merritt? They didn't have to spend all of their time with their nose in a journal?

Sometimes I feel like that's really not the case, that I was imagining that whole event, and that I'll spend the rest of my life in front of the computer, typing, committed to the reality that popular culture is going to escape further and further from my ability to know it, understand it. At times like these, I fire up my PS3 and play some video games, assuming netflix hasn't sent me my next movie yet.

do I or don't I double that L?

I'm having a real hard time figuring out what distinction, if any, is made by native speakers of English between the two spellings for modelling/modeling.

Is one British and the other English? if so, which is which?
Do they refer to different things? is modeling what fashion models do and modelling what scientists do?

The verb 'compel' gets an additional 'l' when derived (compelling and not compeling)
But the verb 'boil' doesn't (boiling and not boilling)

Does it have to do with how many syllables are in the root? It doesn't seem that way since:
Counsel becomes counseling and not counselling...

WTF? Are there any other -l ending words that have this dichotomy of spelling choice?

Either the internet is no help or my googling skills are becoming worthless in my old age. I'll be super embarrassed if it's something incredibly obvious that I'm too dumb to see...

I think it should be called FACE DANCE (or feesu daansu)

Yet another way the Japanese can be CrazyCool.

I think what's happening in the video below is: one of the four people rigged up a system that converts tones to electical impulses.  Those electrical impulses are then sent to these poor people's face muscles.  The music starts playing, and what you get is

FACE DANCE

That dream where you forget you signed up for that class and haven't gone to it all semester and a project/final is coming up...

Today's XKCD hits home.



I didn't realize other people had this dream.
I've had it countless times, at least once every semester during my undergraduate career. But I haven't had it so often since I've become a grad student. I can only remember having it once in the past 2 years.

I wonder if Randall is right about this dream haunting me for the rest of my life...

Damn

Brain decline begins at 27.

In related but lighter news, this week I calculated that I am nearly 342 months old.

Take-off rap

If you are a flight attendant, this is how you get people to pay attention to you during those boring pre-flight instructions:



Yet another way Southwest is better than any other US airline.

Critical Discourse Analysis and why I fucking despise it

Sohail Karmani forwards the following question (from some person named tom nagy) to a newsgroup interested in Critical Discourse Analysis:

"Is discourse analysis at the primative level of medicine 100 years ago when it could diagnose but not intervene successfully? If this is so, it would be critical to be aware of this dismal state of affairs."

and he continues with his own point

This is precisely the problem I have with CDA. As I see it, the whole thing is based on the self-serving assumption that society desperately needs a vanguard class of experts who can unravel the encoded messages in a given text that elude the dumb and stupid masses. Only such a class is best placed to carry out this function because it exclusively possesses all the tools, jargon and "insights" that are even beyond normal capabilities of your average academic. Taxi drivers, builders, single mothers, cleaning ladies, janitors and so on just wouldn't have a clue what goes on in the marvellous world of CDA. Of course the whole thing (like other specializations in academia) is a total fraud! All you need all is a modicum of intelligence and a bit of critical awareness and anyone can unravel the "deep meanings" that reside in texts. The bottom line (as I see it) is CDA is embarrassingly straightforward stuff dressed up in layers and layers of self-serving unintelligible jargon.

And this is the response he received (if you're like me, you had a hard time making it past point #4, so if you want to know what I think of all of this, scroll all the way down):

1) The problem of human activity being "self-serving" isn't necessarily a critical point of contention here though.

2) In our quasi-solipsist existence, with no real access to the inner, word-defying (CDA-defying at that) flux of emotional appeal or subjective contemplation or whatever you want to call, humans can obviosly act little beyond their unavoidable "self-serving" ways.

3) Capitalist greed is reified and hits a certain bulwark (based in ordained careerism and defined sycophantism, etc.) telling it where to end; revolutionaries, on the other hand, are too greedy for greed.

4) Putting an end to these moronic vanguard thought specialists requires unpredented levels of greed based in the concept of self-management (we cannot manage ourselvves, attempt to act autonomously, etc. without facing, whether to our chagrin or not, the complete necessity to be greedy -- how else can we act for ourselves as opposed to how a certain elitist group of specialists might want us to act?)

5) http://www.point-of-departure.org/Lust-For-Life/RTBGreedy-v1_2_5-en.htm

6) We are necessarily greedy, this isn't really the problem -- to see the problem in CDA, we must go beyond this typical condescension for those "greedy capitalist pigs."

7) Nothing can be new which is already expressed, in that such an expression itself is already an unavoidable reification (including all of those popular greed concepts) even if it hasn't been extracted from the mind yet into the concurrence of linguistic reality; even if it hasn't come into a replication of its own outside of the individual's thought processes.

8) It takes on the form of a reification even at the point of becoming an object within consciousness.

9) Any sort of synthesized language, "subjective" or "objective" is already reified.

10) However, what is felt (the ineffable) can never be expressed in the same way that what is expressed can never be known beyond the concurring linguistic "fact" that it, in fact, isn't known outside of its pragmatic relationships or rational connections -- it isn't known within the mind of an individual subject, but merely represented or signified; it isn't felt or sensed in word-defying manner based in the infinite continuum of euphoria to chagrin (and everything in between), but merely projected in a boring, commensurable manner.

11) In a basic sense, the ineffability of subjective emotion, desire and sensation is the affirmation of our current solipsist reality (which is the reality comprised of human / object interrelation housing the existence comprised of unverifiable meaning outside of mind).

For the solipsist, it is not merely the case that he believes that his thoughts, experiences, and emotions are, as a matter of contingent fact, the only thoughts, experiences, and emotions. Rather, the solipsist can attach no meaning to the supposition that there could be thoughts, experiences, and emotions other than his own. In short, the true solipsist understands the word 'pain,' for example, to mean 'my pain.' He cannot accordingly conceive how this word is to be applied in any sense other than this exclusively egocentric one.

-- Stephen P. Thornton

12) When I touch briefly on solipsism, I basically mean it in a sense closely related to the well articulated and aforementioned excerpt -- in the sense that if we are to use the example of "pain," obviously, the dominant ideology (set up by the dictionary and other forms of CDAist mediated concurrence) used to define pain will never be able to define the arbitrary sensation of pain existing subjectively within an individual as such a sensation is inherently ineffable and simply cannot take on any genuine meaning beyond a reified description of what it once "felt" like at some point in the past and in concurrence with a grand, syncretistic, etymological narrative comprising descriptions of what certain types of pain might have felt like to certain types of people.

13) This sort of gathered, learned synthesis of what one might assume pain to be in terms of objective projections of past language will never be able to represent (although it would have you believe otherwise) its actualized, internal meaning for a peculiar subject, as such representations are always based in the past -- i.e. Phil Graham's boring Hilter references -- while what is felt is always based in the transient and elusive present.

14) The ever changing semantics of language simply cannot come close to comprehending the unknown regions of the mind born of "impressions" (as Hume -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#Ideas_and_impressions -- might say).

15) The more one assumes that one's past synthesis comprising spontaneously felt pain can ever hold its own as a truthful definition regarding the ineffable subjectivity of what pain actually is in the ephemeral moment existing just beyond the rationalized meaning of historical narratives, the more one is susceptible to the spectacle of "pain."

16) None the less, autonomous and ad hominem based attempts at interpreting the ineffable are important in that they represent the non-profit and explicit study of the transference of meaning (existing in a personal ambience of their own attempted autonomy and hence outside of the condescending commerce of "official" -- psychology, psychiatry, subsidized/curriculum-based philosophy, CDAist bullshit, etc. -- forms of such study which are almost always quite insidiously in the name of mere utility and workforce augmentation despite their pseudo-subversive claims in the other direction) -- an attempted transient acknowledgement of the emotions and content existing below and thrashing against, for relevant instance, Debord's concept of "spectacle."

17) We must be too greedy to accept the careerist-greed spectacle as a transient, subversive solution... it is the exact opposite and filled to the brim with little more than charlatans...

What a bunch of bullshit (the question almost as much as the 17-part answer).

MICROsoft!

Microsoft Excel can be a fabulous tool.
or
Microsoft Excel can lead to inaccurate results and irreparably ruin your research.

You decide

2 things I miss

One thing I really miss about japan is good, simple, japanese sushi.

Another thing I really miss about japan is the kindness of the people, their good nature. You didn't have to worry about most people trying to swindle or cheat you. You could feel pretty confident that if you forgot your jacket on a train station platform, you could go back on the same train line (in the other direction) and find it where you left it (or one of the attendants will have it safe and waiting for you).

So when I see videos like the one below (the second of its kind) it brings me back and makes me miss the place a bit more.