Looking Out To Sea

On Monday my parents took us out to see Cabaret at the Playhouse. I admit I’m not a great fan of musicals, and Cabaret exemplifies everything I don’t like about them.

• The plot was almost non-existent. In fact, I’m not even sure there was one.
• That doesn’t matter, because whatever could have happened in the story would have been irrelevant, because I didn’t care in the least for any of the characters.
• The songs were indistinct so I couldn’t really tell what they were singing about anyway. Even the one song I did know — that would be the title song — was pretty mumbled.

Oh well, I knew I didn’t like musicals. I did see something horrifying, something that completely blew my mind. A woman sitting in the row in front had a Cliff Richard diary. Will horrors never cease?

Anyway, here’s Cabaret, the song,in BSL.

At the weekend Helen and I were experimented on, and then to make up for it were given cake!

Doing psychology or linguistics experiments is a fairly common feature of the undergraduate lifestyle. There are always MSc or PhD students willing to give you something in exchange for screwing up their experiment giving them useful data.

Emily’s doing some research into the two-stage model of word recall/production. Maybe she’ll actually blog about it at some point, and give the proper details. Until then you’ll have to put up with my loose interpretation of her explanation from Saturday.

• Word recall and production is modelled as a two stage process.
• The first stage calls up semantic details and (crucially) syntactic details. So you know what the word means and how to use it. But you don’t actually know the word!
• The trick is to force people to manage the first step but to stall at the second step — the point where the word is on the tip of your tongue but you just can’t quite bring it forth. Tip-of-tongue state (ToT from now on).
• Once you’ve got your lab rats into ToT you can ask them questions which should, according to the model, be answerable — like whether the word is a mass or count noun.

(Emily’s actual work relates to sign language production too, so all this was being done on native English speakers as a control group. Then the hard work of putting signers into tip-of-finger state must commence.)

The actual experiment involved watching a screen flash up definitions for words, which we then had to write down. The hope was that we’d eventually hit a definition for which we knew the word but couldn’t quite bring it to the fore. In which case there were further boxes to complete regarding initial letters, syllables, mass/count. Out of 60 definitions I only found myself in ToT once. Compared to about 5 occasions when I couldn’t think of a word at all that would fit the definition.

So we did that, ate chocolate cake and drank tea.

We walked around the shops in the Newington and Grassmarket area for the afternoon. Got some lunch in Cafe Luciano (amazing bacon rolls) and took a bus over to Stockbridge for more wandering. We met Sarah (from our old sign language class) and her partner (Steve?) in the one pub that wasn’t completely rugbified to the gills. Then we went over for tea at Sarah and Ferdia’s (different Sarah). I now know what Julia Roberts’ favourite drink is.

I’m heading out this morning to do frightfully grown-up things like look for curtains. So this is just a quick post.

Last night we went to a talk by David Colquhoun in the bowels of Appleton Tower. There’s a building that’s changed! Anyway, Prof Colquhoun was talking about pseudoscience in British universities, and his ceaseless campaign of blogging and letter-writing to get them to stop. There are a remarkable number of universities out there that will give you a Bachelor of Science degree in homeopathy or crystal healing.

After that we went to 56 North, the new name for the Human Be In, still as horrendously overpriced as it ever was. Well done to Ella for post-dissertation hangover. :-) We headed home early in order to conserve our middle-aged sensibilities for the curtain-shopping ahead of us.

As nice a program as Banshee is, they did something really strange during development. At some point they broke everything — presumably for a rewrite — and are slowly assembling it again.

So things that were working well in the early days, like album covers, have become more of a pain with the slicker later versions. If you’re having trouble with album covers here are a few things that might help you.

• Dropping a folder.jpg file in the album folder does work, but with a number of caveats.

• Album covers are cached in ~/.cache/album-art/. And various subfolders too, for different sizes. It’s best to delete the relevant file from this cache before doing anything. Luckily the correspondence between filename and album is very simple:

  $ cd ~/.cache/album-art
  $ rm robertplantalisonkrauss-raisingsand.jpg
  $ rm */robertplantalisonkrauss-raisingsand.jpg

  It should be fairly easy to find the cached images with this naming scheme. Once the cache has been deleted Banshee will pick up the folder.jpg file you added manually to the album folder.

• Album names that includes funny characters (parentheses and colons, for example) don’t parse properly. So inserting folder.jpg in the right place will have no effect.

  Instead you need to copy the album cover to the cache, ignoring the dodgy characters.

  $ cd .cache/album-art
  $ cp ~/Music/Classic\ FM/Movies\:\ The\ Ultimate\ Collection/folder.jpg classicfm-moviestheultimatecollection.jpg

  Then it’ll just magically appear in Banshee, in the right place, and all the other resized versions will be generated without problem.

I hope this helps some people out for the more complicated scenarios. Eventually this bug will be fixed and Banshee will not have these problems at all. (Also, interested parties might want to check out that bug thread to see how far down a rat hole one can get with the “simple” topic of album art.)

This blog post was written months ago, and I never got round to posting it because I was about to head off at a long and probably pointless tangent. In the interest of getting it out there I’ve removed the rambling at the end.

I finished Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought at the weekend. It is a good book, with plenty to make you think and even a bit to disagree with. But there’s always plenty to disagree with when people talk about grammar. And he is American, so there’s bound to be a few areas where our grammars do not overlap.

He goes to some effort to make sure you realise that, despite being a book about thought and language, it’s not a book about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Which is fair enough; Sapir-Whorf discussions get tedious quite quickly.

Instead he writes about what we can infer about our thoughts from how we speak, with particular mind to grammar and metaphors. He argues that there are certain fundamental states and actions which all of our words fall into — some words imply an active agent, some imply possession or transfer of possession, some imply contact while some work at a distance. This argument was interesting for the way it cuts across the groups of words we naturally think about. Words which seem connected (flow and pour) are completely different, while those with seemingly nothing in common operate similarly. (The way Steven Pinker describes the fundamental traits brought to mind the object/morphism talk of category theory. If only I knew more about either linguistics or category theory!)

The other important message of the book, as I mentioned, is metaphors. Having showed how we talk in terms of actions, movement and possession, Pinker then points out that most of the abstract and sophisticated speeech we use are metaphors based on physical counterparts. Once he points out (oh, there’s a metaphor, he didn’t point at anything did he?) that we talk in metaphors all the time it becomes a personal competition to phrase things neutrally. It’s difficult, let me tell you. Try it yourself.

I do recommend this book. I was given it for Christmas, as well as another slim book by Steven Pinker, which turned out to be a chapter from this one, extracted and published separately: The Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television. It’s about swearing, its cognitive effects and such. If you don’t feel up to reading the whole of The Stuff of Thought, this chapter works very effectively on its own. And who knows, you may start again on chapter one when you’ve finished.

I’m just back from the Edinburgh Cafe Sci with Philip Wadler as speaker.

The evening started with Ed giving a welcome to everybody and explaining what the standard procedure is: a short talk, a break for drinks, then some questions.

Then Philip Wadler stood up and introduced himself as working in the field of computer science, a name with only two problems — the emphasis on technology suggested by the word “computer” and the desperate plea for relevance that calling yourself a science seems to imply! He then said that his aim for the evening was to argue that there is depth to computer science that has nothing to do with the job of IT support.

He started with the basics of logic, in the study of rhetoric founded by the ancient Greeks. He asked everyone to do a short experiment — in fact, two different statements of the famous Wason card problem — as a demonstration of the power of logic and also its usefulness in even the simplest setting.

Having demonstrated that logic probably isn’t all that bad after all, he started a brief history of 19th century logic. George Boole invented a calculus of logic, to the delight of Leibniz (who I think was dead by then, but probably felt vindicated all the same). Frege came in later, someone whose name I didn’t catch (Gensen?) and then onto Church and the lambda calculus. Finally, he explained that many of these proofs and reinterpretations were shown to be equivalent.

It’s hard, very hard, to get across the beauty of things like lambda calculus to anyone, never mind the drinking patrons of a cinema bar, especially when you have no overhead projection facilities. I’m impressed Philip Wadler held everyone’s attention for so long, though inevitably there were some points where the focus began to waver. I think he suffered from lack of preparation, to be honest.

After the interval the questions were quite mixed. There were a couple on the competing language paradigms and the apparent lack of inroads that functional languages have had in the Real World™. Some guy (okay, I say “some guy” but it’s the same tedious guy every time) wanted to argue that logic wasn’t universal but I think any evidence he might have had was self-refuting. Gödel was touched on, and the fascinating but subtle topic of incompleteness and inconsistency. He got in a plug for research people are doing at Edinburgh into proof-carrying code. And he also highlighted that Scotland is the home of two important functional languages (or families), ML and Haskell. And maybe I’m not being true to my East coast roots here, but I prefer Haskell. :-)

If you couldn’t make it, or want more Wadler goodness, I recommend this Google Tech Talk on “Faith, Evolution and Programming Languages”.

This is a wee announcement for anyone who wasn’t paying attention earlier. Philip Wadler will be the speaker at this week’s Café Scientifique, so I highly recommend you go.

Those details in full:

• Title: “Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century Computing”
• Date: Monday 16th March
• Time: 8.30pm
• Place: Filmhouse cafe bar, Lothian Road

As the 19th century drew to a close, logicians formalized an ideal notion of proof. They were driven by nothing other than an abiding interest in truth, and their proofs were as ethereal as the mind of God. Yet within decades these mathematical abstractions were realized by the hand of man, in the digital stored-program computer. How it came to be recognized that proofs and programs are the same is a story that spans a century, a chase with as many twists and turns as a thriller. At the end of the story is a principle for designing programming languages that will guide computers into the 21st century.

On a related note, one of the Cafe Sci organisers has started a new blog, so go and visit to say hello. Welcome to blogging Ed!

Last weekend we holidayed in Galloway. (Actually, it’s now two weekends ago because it’s taken ages to get the photos online.)

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After watching the BBC’s excellent Victorian Farm series on TV and iPlayer, I was enthused by the notion of traditional crafts. I enjoyed watching the straw-hat weavers and the basket makers working their magic. I want to spend this year expanding my repertoire in that direction. I am happy that my bread-making has come together, so what else can I turn my hand to?

At the top of the list, unconnected though they be, sit brewing and basket-weaving. Making home brews is a bit of a beardy-man thing to do, like medieval battle re-enactments or role play board gaming. It has an air of comic juvenility to it. But it’s also a culinary skill and an ancient craft, which is what I’m aiming for. It’s also something that I can try at home with a minimum of extra tools and materials. A large bucket and somewhere to store it seem to be the principal concerns.

Basket-making is another thing entirely. Thankfully Helen knew where to look. The Four Winds Inspiration Centre (I know, what kind of comedy name is that?) work at a nearby park and do day and weekend classes in basket weaving, furniture, stone and wood carving and so on. I’ll be giving them a call as soon as I can to ask about availability. There’s a class on Saturday 9 May for round basket weaving which seems like a good place to start. Here’s to another year of learning!

Yesterday afternoon we saw the eagerly-awaited-by-some comic adaptation, Watchmen. The first laugh comes in the opening credits with the line “Adapted from the graphic novel co-created by Dave Gibbons”. Yep, that’s Alan Moore staying well out of it, as usual. And, as usual, he was right to do so.

The real flaw for Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen is that he doesn’t seem to realise he’s directing a film, instead of filling in the gaps between storyboard frames. I’m sure if you read the script you could easily find the 12 discrete episodes that made up the original, faithfully translated into the new medium. The result is disjointed, lacking in momentum and somewhat emotionless.

Tragically, what ruins the overall film is what makes each individual scene so good — the faithful rendering of the original. Most of the characters and their complexity came across quite well. I was really worried that Rorschach wouldn’t translate well to the screen, so I was really impressed with his character in particular.

SPOILER ALERT

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