Teaching English in my sleep -- to the Korean occupation forces

I dreamed that Korea invaded. They just sort of massed in the hills and mountains overlooking the city (the dream place looked a little like Kyoto) and then filed in. The young soldiers were polite and seemed a little sheepish, so you almost felt a little sorry for them. Since the occupation was non-violent, there was no violent resistance, either, but there were some arguments along the lines of "Hey! Whaddaya think you're doing? This is stupid!" Young women were deployed too as soldier/spokespersons for the occupiers. For some reason they had decided to use English rather than Korean or Japanese as the occupation language. I became busy talking with the Korean spokeswomen over how the meaning of various edicts changed when there was no article as opposed to the definite or indefinite article.

May Day in the Life

I played a tape today, oh boy
a VHS from MCMXCIII
and tho the sound was rather bad
we had to listen as
Sachiko, Ricardo and Maria took a business class
I'd love to turn it off

"Grass-eaters"

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20111126b2.html
The remarkable decline of dating in the "herbivore" age:

 Sexes set record in dating disinterest | The Japan Times Online

A record-high 61.4 percent of unmarried Japanese males aged between 18 and 34 have no girlfriend, up 9.2 percentage points from 2005, a June 2010 survey by a research body showed Friday.

Post-human invader

Octopus Walks on Land at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjQr3lRACPI

We come in peace. To occupy your land.

Mindmapping your bubble diagram

https://bubbl.us/
For the Mac, there is MyMind, a mind-mapping (diagramming) app which converts to and from an outline. Linux has Freemind, VYM(ViewYourMind), Labyrinth, and Semantik, which don't seem to be as good as MyMind. Commercially, there's Inspiration for Windows. Somehow I missed the web-based option of bubbl.us until recently. You can export to png or jpg without creating an account, and control the colors and font sizes easily.

Komatsu Sakyo (Japan Sinks)

Death of a sci-fi pioneer | The Japan Times Online
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ed20110814a1.html
On July 26, Komatsu Sakyo, a pioneer in Japanese science fiction, died at the age of 80. Born in Osaka in 1931, he witnessed firsthand the devastation of World War II. After graduating from Kyoto University with a degree in Italian literature ...
By chance, the announcement in the book by an American geodesic group of a massive shift in the earth's crust centered on the Japanese archipelago takes place on March 11, with Mount Fuji erupting the next day.

This Could Also Explain How Your Blogger CAPTCHA Gets Solved: Chinese prisoners sold to spammers

Chinese Prisoners Allegedly Forced to Play 'World of Warcraft'
www.pcworld.com
One former prisoner says he had to farm virtual gold that the prison guards then sold in the real world for cash.
http://soc.li/KLDAhnh
Prison guards were reportedly able to sell the virtual currency for up to 6,000 yuan a day, which is about $930 -- not a bad sum. The prisoners, who naturally never saw any of the money, also had quotas to meet. According to Dali, "If I couldn't complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me."

DR. GABOR MATÉ on DN

http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/dr_gabor_mat

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/15/dr_gabor_mat_when_the_body

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/24/dr_gabor_mat_on_the_stress

DR. GABOR MATÉ: You know, in other words—see, it never used to be that children grew up in a stressed nuclear family. That wasn’t the normal basis for child development. The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another. People don’t work where they live. They don’t shop where they live. The kids don’t go to school, necessarily, where they live. The parents are away most of the day. For the first time in history, children are not spending most of their time around the nurturing adults in their lives. And they’re spending their lives away from the nurturing adults, which is what they need for healthy brain development.

AMY GOODMAN: Canadian physician Dr. Gabor Maté, his book, _Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It_.

Rashomon online

Colonel Khaddafi's Jamahiriya

During the inspiring Egyptian uprising to overthrow Hosni Mubarak, I thought the best solution would be to offer Hosni a seat on the last space shuttle flight. The last minute training would surely draw him away from his duties as the president of Egypt as well as appeal to his ego. As far as I know, this is what happened. We don't really know what they told him, come this way sir, the palace is on fire, we must evacuate. How is your dinner this evening, sir. Are you feeling drowsy? I doubt that he actually resigned, based on what we know of his personality, but when Suleiman announced that the president had resigned, everyone seemed to take it as fact except me.

Offering a trip to space is not an option with Brother-Leader Colonel Murmeror Khaddaffi. It's too late and nobody would ever be able to pretend to want to go to space with him. Apparently, according to Murmeror Gadafi, everyone in Libya is on Israeli psychedelics. What a long strange trip it's been.

WTF Breakout?

Marc Maron's WTF popped up as a number 7 of the top 10 funny things(?) of the year in Rolling Stone and is the subject of an article in The New York Times. This is in addition to the minor appearances in other places such as Jewcy and Re:Comedy. The slideshow at the NYT has a few new pictures, too. I knew WTF was getting more listeners, but I'm a little surprised to hear Brendan McDonald say 200,000. It still feels like there are 200 or 2,000 of us listening.

Post-human Cyber-remains

The New York Times has a lengthy and interesting article by Rob Walker discussing digital immortality (or whatever you want to call it). Much of the article revolves around the late Mac Tonnies and his Posthuman Blues blog. Maybe you should download the article to your computer; you never know when The New York Times will suddenly disappear completely. The article include links to tribute sites Mac-Bots and Post-Mac Blues. According to one item in the article, the possibility of a real Mac-Bot is getting closer:

Something called Lifenaut.com has a product called a MindFile, “a database of personal reflections captured in video, image, audio and documents about yourself that can be saved, searched, downloaded and shared with friends.” This information is meant to be filtered through an “interactive avatar,” modeled on you, “that becomes more intelligent as you add more information.” The site welcomes you with a sweeping, ominous tone; the company’s tag line is “Eternalize.” VirtualEternity.com, from a company called Intellitar, also claims to convert the personal data you provide into an avatar — sort of like one of those chatbots that some online companies use for automated but more humanish customer service. “We want to give users the gift of immortality,” an Intellitar founder has said.

Eels: Tomorrow Morning

I ran across this new interview with E about a week ago.



Tomorrow Morning is something to look forward to. By the way, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives has become available again on YouTube after having been taken down sometime after I last referred to it. ("This video has been removed due to a copyright claim by the BBC.")You may want to DLHelper yourself to those mp4s before they get taken down again, because the price of buying the dvd ($40.49!) is a ridiculous price to pay for not recording it when it was broadcast on TV.

Just for the hell of it, here's an NPR interview from June 2009.



...and an official Eels video from April 2009.

Revisiting Constructed Languages

I took a constructed language walkabout today, reading about the USA in constructed languages:

Mergu'e (Lojban)
http://jbo.wikipedia.org/wiki/mergu
That's almost 100% unintelligible words.


Statos Unite de America (Interlingua)
http://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statos_Unite_de_America
That's almost 100% intelligible to any educated westerner.


Unionita Stati di Amerika, abreviata Usa, (Ido)
http://io.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usa
Ido is an offspring of Esperanto--and an improvement. Notice it's now the "Wikipedio".


Unuiĝintaj Ŝtatoj de Ameriko (=Usono) (Esperanto)
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usono
Diacritics suck. Who needs 'em? (It's the "Vikipedio")
And too much inflection. I want an isolating language.
Sorry, Esperanto. It's a shame.


Unionati States de Amerika (Novial)
http://nov.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionati_States_de_Amerika
(It's the WikipediE)


Lamerikän (Volapük)
http://vo.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA
(In the Vükiped)


Lojban is really going to have an uphill struggle.
Lojban picture dictionary: (pixra liste loi gismu)
http://jbo.wikipedia.org/wiki/pixra_liste_loi_gismu

I like the ideas of Lojban in principle (when reading about it), but in practice (when reading in it), I'm more inclined to favor Interlingua after a brief tour of the constructed languages wikipedia pages for Mergu'e, also known as Statos Unite de America, Unionita Stati di Amerika, Unuiĝintaj Ŝtatoj de Ameriko, Unionati States de Amerika, and Lamerikän.

A lot of linguistic cruft is disposed of with the principle that if one language doesn't have it (a linguistic feature) then Interlingua doesn't need it. It must be 5 times easier than learning Spanish. I wish they could teach that to kids in elementary school as a prelude to going on to Spanish or French or something else.

Interlingua could be a good language for the EU. They can't always provide a translation for every document in every language but an Interlingua version could be a neutral compromise.

Lojban has been criticized as Procrustean, re-inventing the wheel of the language corpus from the most commonly co-occurring phonemes of Chinese, English, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and Hindi/Urdu, and as a result producing words unintelligible to any speaker.

The reason I was thinking about this was because of a new constructed language which I read about: ROILA, the RObot Interaction LAnguage.

"Paul the Octopus" vs "Sarah Palin"

Paul the Octopus is currently leading Sarah Palin in the polls for the preferred Republican Presidential candidate in 2012. Voters are weighing doubts about the candidate's eligibility for the office and a suspected foreign place of birth with the possibility that the other candidate's brain is a sac of water. The creature's "brain", or water-filled sac, is believed to help propel the creature through the surrounding media.

Octoracle

The lyrics as well as I can make out:

Paul the Octopus
by Aiden Ajar

I'm just a cephalopod
I'm only 2 years old
oh--but I'm the 8 legged oracle
or so I'm told

oh wonderful octopus
you're the great prophet of our time
we need a leader to reveal us truth
if I feed you mussels will you please be mine?

all attention will be on your tank
we'll base our lives on the way you behave
be our master, be our saviour
most of all be our slave

I'm just a cephalopod
I've never even seen a tv
oh you think that I control your destiny
oh I don't even know I live in Germany

oh terrible octopus
you're the worst mollusk of our time
we needed you to reveal us truth
--well, I suppose you did but we do not like the truth--
we hold you responsible
off with your tentacles
I will eat you
I will eat you
I will eat you

I'm just a cephalopod
I don't even know what FIFA is!
don't barbecue me
don't cut me into pieces
don't crucify me
I never asked to be your jesus...

(edited 2010¤07·16°)

Hide and Seek

Stephen Hawking (not to be confused with Stephen King) says it may be best to Hide from Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.(You can still search for it, but be vewy vewy quiet.)

Macbot News

Macbots, a Mac Tonnies tribute site, is developing nicely. There was an interview on Technoccult with facilitators blazingbetta and capnmarrrrk. Mac's last book, The Cryptoterrestrials: A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and the Aliens Among Us, published posthumously, is available from Anomolist books, amazon.co.jp and amazon.com. I haven't got it yet.

Sparklehorse

It's a wonderful life. Then again, it could be better. Mark Linkous = Sparklehorse = shot himself in the heart with his rifle a week ago. He was a talented musician, and I appreciated his work.

xkcd

A few favorites from xkcd: