Tom Noir

tomnoir @ 2009-12-09T22:33:00

2009-12-10T03:33:56Z

So you might want to hit up SmashingPumpkins.com. There you can download the first song from Teargarden for free ninety-nine.

That's one song down, forty-three to go if Billy Corgan sticks to the plan for this immense, totally free, digital 'album of EPs' that he has announced.

So check the site or you can just go

not currently watching: slingers

2009-12-05T16:00:14Z

Great. Now I'm hooked on a TV show that doesn't exist yet. Can you blame me? It oozes style, features intriguing art direction, has some great lines, and it's in space. OCEAN'S 11 IN SPACE, PEOPLE. Well, better spread the ~~joy~~ misery:

SLINGERS from Mike Sizemore on Vimeo.

This is basically a pitch that a guy named Mike Sizemore is doing for TV execs, hoping to shoot a pilot early next year. I'd say he's on the right track. Here's hoping that this is a show we're actually watching a year from now.

waving the flag

2009-12-05T00:27:52Z

When I was living abroad, the question of how Europeans felt about Americans occasionally came up. Opinions generally ranged from ambivalent to negative, although I personally never encountered any hostility. That said, my Albanian friend Joan surprised me on the topic one day.

"I will tell you one place where they like Americans," he said. "Albania!" "Really?" I said, surprised. "Oh yes. Albanians LOVE Americans! You helped us out in the war." "Oh, okay..." I said.

Well, I guess Joan wasn't lying - Mental_Floss has a nice little bit about a competition to design a bronze statue of George W. Bush, to be placed in... Bush Square! Sounds like W will always have friends in the town of Fushe-Kruje...

The Boston Globe features an interesting article on the reasons behind Albania's love affair with America. Strange to think that we've twice saved from extinction a country that most Americans couldn't find on a map!

I will say that based purely on my experience of Joan's cooking abilities, Albanian food must represent the pinnacle of Mediterranean cuisine. A culture well worth preserving!

if you thought they smelled bad on the outside...

2009-11-30T15:30:30Z

Well, ThinkGeek has done it again: taken an April Fool's joke and turned it into a real product. This time, it's the unbelievably awesome Tauntaun Sleeping Bag. I don't know what is more amazing, the fact that you can pull open the zipper using a tiny lightsaber or the tauntaun guts lovingly stenciled on the inside.

Of course they're completely sold out now, but I'm sure you can find one on ebay. Whatever those people are asking is a small price to pay for owning the world's only sleeping bag made from synthetic tauntaun fur, amirite?

In other news, my iTunes playlist on random is totally rocking out this morning.

good times

2009-11-25T21:49:54Z

The Muppets cover 'Bohemian Rhapsody'.

the txt is mightier

2009-11-22T04:04:38Z

Via Writer's Write: The Washing Post reports that a new study has found texting doesn't impact kids' ability to spell. Actually, that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is that 'text language' actually requires spelling ability:

The young people surveyed seem to know, without any sort of instruction, that there are "correct" ways of spelling in chatspeak. For instance, "probably" is abbreviated as "prolly," but never "proly"; "want to" becomes "wanna," never "wana" or "wanta"; "should've" is always "shoulda" and never "shuda."

"Kids who are good spellers [academically] are good spellers in instant messaging," she said. "And kids who are poor spellers in English class are poor spellers in instant messaging."

In other words, txt is a 'dialect' of the written English language.

This will surprise a lot of people, but it logically follows if you've read The Power of Babel. After all, we're all speaking a bastardized and watered down version of some previous language. Only history and the printing press has given our dialect any special stamp of authenticity. And guess what, the printing press is rapidly becoming obsolete...

At any rate, it's the norm throughout much of the world for people, even children, to speak both an official language and an unofficial dialect at home. There's no reason why modern American kids can't have room in their brains for both English spelling and 'txt'.

dance club?

2009-11-22T02:27:52Z

Did you know that there's a Bollywood remake of Fight Club?

True story.

I'm sure that many of us saw David Fincher's seminal 1999 film about nihilism, self-destructive impulses and the male id and thought, "What this film needs is more song-and-dance numbers." Well, maybe only one person thought this, but he appears to have been an Indian director.

Actually, from what I can tell probably no one involved in Fight Club Members Only has actually seen the American film, and the only people interested in referencing it were probably the marketing department. The Bollywood film's story of a rough-and-tumble group of friends who get in trouble with the law doesn't appear to have anything to do with Edward Norton's trajectory of insomnia and schizophrenia.

Still, comments on various related sites along the lines of "at least this one isn't full of people bashing each others heads with baseball bats" reveal that even a decade on, a lot of people don't have a clue what the original film was about. The perception seems to be that it was a piece of exploitative, macho, ultra-violent Hollywood trash. Perhaps this isn't so suprising, given the movies' famously difficult-to-explain plot.

So, I thought I'd give the summary a whirl. Here's your spoiler-free guide to David Fincher's Fight Club:

The narrator and protagonist (who by the way is never named in the film but who is generally referred to as Jack due to a series of ironic asides made throughout the movie) is having trouble sleeping.

Jack is a young office drone blindly following consumer culture who has, largely unbeknownst to himself, become increasingly dissatisfied with his nice, tidy, hermetically sealed life. In pursuit of some sort of meaningful reality he takes several strange detours, during which he encounters a self-destructive woman named Marla and a charismatic rebel named Tyler Durden.

Jack is as drawn to Tyler's devil-may-care individuality as he is repulsed by Marla's. And he's not the only one. When the two of them start an impromptu fist fight outside a pub, other disenfranchised males are drawn into Tyler's orbit as well, and the titular Fight Club is born.

Tyler encourages Jack to take risks, do dangerous things and generally live it up. But Jack finds Tyler's schemes increasingly frightening and begins to wonder if things aren't spinning completely out of control. And Marla may be in danger.

Fight Club is a movie with a famous twist, and it's one that is so ridiculous and so ballsy that only a movie as deeply metaphorical as this one could pull it off. Because that's what the film ultimately is, a metaphor; it's a huge, deconstructive exploration of a repressed male psyche.

Edward Norton called Fight Club a zeitgeist film, and that's what it is. Released two years before 9/11, it spoke to a culture of guys with nothing to fight, no purpose other then bland, corporate-sponsored consumerism. If there's a central message to the film, it might be that if people don't have a reason to fight for, they'll invent one.

There are only a handful of actual fight scenes in the movie, although they are pretty brutal. More disturbing is the very black humor. This is a film that riffs on cancer patients, liposuction clinics and domestic terrorism. It's not for the faint of heart.

The film has often been accused of promoting nihilism, and it's true that an unreflective young male viewer could come away thinking he'd just seen a film that was an endorsement of fascist machismo. On closer inspection, though, it's pretty clear that while this is a philosophical phase our 'hero' Jack is going through, that he ultimately rejects it and that the film is not endorsing it.

Jack is the center of the film, but he's no hero. As Jack says in one of the closing lines of the film, "I'm afraid you've met me at a very strange time in my life." Fight Club is a portrait of the male psyche in the modern age. An exaggerated portrait, definitely, but in its extremes it still illustrates some real truths: Western civilization has succeeded spectacularly at providing for our material needs, while failing to address spiritual needs at almost every turn.

There will always be Tyler Durdens waiting to step up and fill that void.

On a side-note, I am of the opinion that Fight Club is a genuine 'guy movie' in a way that most 'testosterone-fueled thrill rides' aren't. It's about men on a very fundamental level. Of course we have Helena Bonham-Carter's Marla representing the ladies in the movie, but it's safe to say that her part in the story is seen mainly from the man's perspective. Plus the poor woman puts up with more than her share of abuse from our 'heroes'.

I'm not saying that women can't enjoy the movie, and I know some that do. But as far as tales of post-modern disaffection go, this is the XY version.

That said, I'm curious, is there a female equivalent? What film represents the girls' Fight Club? And if one doesn't exist, what would such a story look like?

life in the digital fast lane

2009-11-21T02:14:03Z

Via Wired, this is really interesting:

The late ’70s, when punk exploded and disco imploded, were tumultuous years for the music industry. A time bomb embedded in legislation from that era, the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, could bring another round of tumult to the business, due to provisions that allow authors or their heirs to terminate copyright grants — or at the very least renegotiate much sweeter deals by threatening to do so.

I had never heard of this, but it apparently applies to ALL post-1978 copyrights. Any artist of any kind who sold their copyright since that year only has to wait 35 years for the rights to return to them. And the first of the works recorded under the new law will start rolling over in 2013.

Is anyone planning on taking advantage of this? Oh heck yes.

The Eagles plan to file grant termination notices by the end of the year, according to Law.com. “It’s going to happen,” said Eveline. “Just think of what the Eagles are doing when they get back their whole catalog. They don’t need a record company now…. You’ll be able to go to Eaglesband.com (updated) and get all their songs. They’re going to do it; it’s coming up.”

OUCH, record companies! That one is really going to hurt. Of course, how many seminal bands came out of that period? A lot, I'd say. And these are bands that, as Wired sagely points out, probably sell more albums today than most new artists.

The whole article is worth reading - it's got more details on the law taking effect as well as the record companies' (limited) options for fighting back.

AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION - I really wanted to work a play on 'Hotel California' into the subject but was unable to come up with one. Can you?

Dragon Age Continues

2009-11-21T01:44:04Z

So, Game Critics has pretty much got my back on Dragon Age with their new review:

HIGH BioWare's character work is the best in the biz.

LOW The combat system is a mess.

WTF Screwing up a quest by missing one line of dialogue 20 hours beforehand.

Although, poor slobs played the thing on the XBox 360, where you get no overhead camera option. I've heard that the combat difficulty is turned down on the console version, but I can't even imagine how you're supposed to play that way.

I'm chugging through the game again on my second character. It's a mage, this time, and while knowing what kind of choices to make this time has definitely eased the difficulty level, it's still a bit of a slog. The main quests always surprise me with how long they wind up being (ANOTHER level of dungeon? Really?!?). I think I could have done with Dragon Age Lite, where they maybe took out every third level of darkspawn slaying.

I know, I know. We wanted a long game, like in Ye Olden Days. And they're giving us what we want. But at this rate I'm not going to finish until Christmas!

the worst medicine

2009-11-18T15:33:25Z

Is there a name for a class of problems that appears to have no good solution? It seems like modern liberal democracies face a few such problems, where there are huge negatives no matter what side of the political fence you are on. Strangely, a large number of these problems seem to be health care related.

Today's head-scratcher: pharmaceuticals research.

The premise: new pharmaceutical breakthroughs save lives and improve the quality of life for everyone, in the long-term.

The problem: pharmaceutical research is hugely expensive, difficult and time-consuming.

IF people are not allowed to profit from bringing new, effective drugs to market they will do so at a much slower rate or they will not do it at all.

IF people are allowed to profit from bringing new, effective drugs to market they will charge more for popular drugs and refuse to share life-saving information about their research.

To put it another way, the free-market system appears to be the most efficient way to drive life-saving pharmaceutical breakthroughs. But by submitting pharmaceutical research to the free market, research and development is subject to all the vagaries and downfalls of the free market.

Unspoken corollary: drugs are a product with an important moral component.

If Company X invents a new pair of sneakers that let you jump 10% higher, they can charge a high price for their product. Albert can afford the sneakers, while Beth cannot. This is too bad for Beth, but not a particularly dire situation. If she is really set on jumping higher, she's just going to have to save and make sacrifices.

However, if Company X invents a new drug that cures diabetes, most people accept that the situation is different. Once again, Albert can afford the drug while Beth cannot. But we are not as comfortable saying "Too bad for Beth." We would like to think that all people are entitled to a good quality of life, regardless of income level.

The underlying tension is that we are using free market principles to develop a good that is not free market. At least, not as our society currently defines it.

There are quite a few things that even in the USA, one of the most free-wheeling capitalist societies on earth, we don't entrust to the free market: government, military defense, grade school education. There are cases where we decide the benefits of cost efficiency do not make up for the negatives of a free market.

For instance, we don't hire private contractors to run our military defense. While private contractors in competition with each other would almost certainly be more cost-effective than a standing, government-run military, there are many possible dangers. Perhaps the most glaring is that such a force is only loyal to the highest bidder and might be easily persuaded to overthrow the federal government. We consider this risk an unacceptable trade-off, therefore we do not treat military defense as a free market good.

But pharma research has a bit more of an urgency to it than military defense does, at least in our modern world. There's a very good argument to be made that we need the efficiency and incentives of the free market.

Is it possible to use profit-driven mechanisms to generate a moral good? Is there a compromise to be found between the extremes of Government Run and Laissez Faire? There are certainly examples of compromise systems out there - the US Postal Service, for example.

But I think that something proponents of a compromise system need to bear in mind is that the free market remains the free market. Asking that pharmaceutical companies or private entrepreneurs simply be 'more moral' will never work. In a system driven by profit, altruism is not going to suddenly win out.

At the same time, increasing regulation will inevitably make pharma companies slower, bigger, and less effective.

And no regulation will lead to a lack of knowledge sharing, premium pricing schemes and monopolistic behavior.

Remember what I said about problems with no good solution?

(inspired by this Freakonomics post)

test yourself

2009-11-17T14:58:22Z

Clicking on the cut-link below will automatically generate a psychological profile based on the writing style on your LiveJournal/blog. Please give it a try and let me know how accurate it is.

You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.

How well do you feel that this profile describes you? Accurate? Inaccurate? On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate it?

For myself, I'd rate it at least an 4. Oh yes, did I mention that I got the same result you did?

Okay, so I might have played a little trick on you. Did you realize that? You did? Well, play along, okay?

Mind Hacks blog reports that this 'profile' was part of a study done by psychologist Bertrand Forer. Forer had all his students take a 'personality test' and then gave each of them this 'individualized' profile and asked them to rate how well it described them. The average score was 4.2.

What this illustrates is known as the Forer Effect: the tendency to see ourselves in vague or generalized statements. It also illustrates why it pays to be skeptical of many so-called personality tests. Not to mention astrology.

we've got to destroy this planet to save it

2009-11-13T22:39:32Z

I don't know who Mike Russel is, but I do know that he made this informative web comic which handily absolves me of all need to see Roland Emmerich's 2012.

Although, honestly, if they really made a movie called Lava Tornado I'd probably have to go and see it.

your military network research at work

2009-11-13T00:25:35Z

You all know sites like ICanHasCheezburger.com and PassiveAgressiveNotes.com. People post photos of cats, over-dramatic roommate missives, and other ephemera for the internet to enjoy.

Well, turns out those sites are just the tip of the iceberg. Hat-tip to The Floss for documenting these and many more esoteric sites:

Animals With Light Sabers

Bad Spock Drawings

Skull-a-Day

Big Beautiful Wonder Woman

Cats Jumping

Bank Robbery Notes

Glum Councilors

Goths in Hot Weather

and,

This Peanut Looks Like A Duck, among many others.

If that doesn't help you waste at least a dozen hours of your life during the next week, I just don't know how to help you.

What age is Dragon Age?

2009-11-07T17:27:00Z

I bought the first full-on, store-bought, $50-and-check-your-video-card-stats PC game last week that I have in ages. I'd been jonesin' for a shiny new RPG, something where you can wander a huge map and play as a cheeky elf bard or surly dwarf paladin. Something where you spend a half hour customizing your character. Something that you could play without sleeping for a couple of days straight and not finish. Something with a good story.

Dragon Age: Origins checked all those boxes handily. So I snapped it up.

The game is, by all accounts, huge. Fifty hours of gameplay, easy. More, no doubt, if you're an obsessive side-quester like me ("What's that little elf boy? You lost your bouncy ball? I will go into these haunted woods and find it!").

DA:O is supposed to be a lot darker and grittier than the D&D-licensed RPGs that have come out in the last decade or so. And it is that, although it's not the darkest or grittiest thing I've ever played by a long shot.

Still, the much-touted 'morally gray' choices are agonizing, especially for a player like me who wants to see every single part of the game. The game seems to delight in tossing the player into situations where there don't seem to be any right answers, and possibly there's not even a happy outcome.

Intellectually, I really appreciate that. So many games that offer 'moral choices' come down to "Would you like to save the orphanage? Or set it on fire?" In the world of DA:O, the orphanage is already on fire and the orphans will grow up to be evil necromancers. Frequently, doing the 'obvious good' thing will lead to unintended consequences. Also frequently, there's no 'good' way to do anything and you have to do the bad thing or stand aside and watch.

Again, it's intellectually more interesting that way. In an actual game, though, it's a bit frustrating in a way. As a player, you want a clear path to reward, and DA:O stubbornly refuses to give it to you. As a story, this makes it realistic. But as a game which you are actually trying to play, it's a bit random. One comes to the point where one wants to save before every conversation.

Debating the pros and cons of such a complex moral choices in the format of a video game is definitely a conversation to be had. There's wiggle room there. But here's an area where there's not wiggle-room: I think Dragon Age: Origins fell into a rut in terms of gameplay mechanics, and that there is a design failure here on the part of the developers.

If you've ever played any of the Baldur's Gate games, the Neverwinter Night games, or there close relatives (basically, any Bioware/Black Isle/Obsidian RPG from the past fifteen years) you're going to be very familiar with the way combat and character leveling works in this game. And you know what, I'm going to say that's not a good thing.

The basic formula involves pausing the real-time combat about once a second (not an exaggeration), moving every character who isn't a mage, and using the mage to drop big area-of-effect spells on the enemy hoardes to mop them up. In a nutshell: extreme micromanagement, and magic-users are king. And this is a system that DA:O takes to the next level, by ratcheting up the difficulty and forcing you to do this kind of thing or watch your party get wiped out by low-level grunts.

The problem is, this is a game that starts out by inviting you to build any character you like. It then has a combat system that emphasizes real-time, one-on-one combat. Yet if you create a wise-cracking rogue duelist, like I did, you'll quickly find that attempting to just 'play' him is an exercise in frustration. Without being heavily optimized and understanding all the ins-and-outs of the game, the character quickly becomes quite useless in combat. And the game does little to prod you in the right direction.

Ultimately, I think these 'semi-real-time' RPGs have bad interfaces. Oh sure, they're polished and easy to navigate. But they're also extremely misleading. They make it look like the game is meant to be played one way, when really it's meant to be played in an entirely different style.

In most of the older games, that didn't matter, but DA:O demands a lot more of players (presumably because many of them have been playing this same kind of game for fifteen years) and is extremely unforgiving if you don't play it the 'right' (but secret!) way.

But here's the problem: I should fall within the cohort of 'veteran' players, since I picked up the first Neverwinter Nights nearly a decade ago. But you know what happened during that decade? I got older! I'm almost thirty, I have two jobs, and I don't want to spend my evenings pouring over the manual, the character creator, and any FAQ I can find online in order to optimize my character and make the game playable. I want something I can come home to in the evening and unwind by spending a couple hours saving the world.

I really, really like DA:O's story and characters so far. But at this point I'm starting to get torn. I want to hear more of it, but advancing through it is like pulling teeth. So I almost don't want to play it. At this point, I'm half-way inclined to start over and build a better optimized character, but I've already sunk 10+ hours into the game.

Is this the kind of game you wanted to make, Bioware? An RPG for teenagers and experts? And do you really think that recycling decades old mechanics is the best approach here anyway?

Hopefully I'll figure out a way to keep playing and enjoying this game. But I also hope that the next game in the series takes a good hard look at some of the fundamentals here. I think one of the world's foremost RPG developers owes players something better than this.

time and again

2009-11-05T22:37:24Z

We're having a very interesting discussion on a recent blog post of mine about which modern authors will stick around to become classics. Do give us your thoughts.

Oh, and just to keep things fair, let's classify 'modern authors' as being people who have released new material within the last thirty years, and are still alive or only recently passed.

time will tell

2009-11-04T19:28:57Z

Very good stuff via Marginal Revolution -

In 1929, The Guardian polled its readers to find out which British authors they thought would still be popular in 100 years. Well, the century isn't quite up, but someone's unearthed this poll, and it's a cautionary tale for leading literary lights.

Here's The Guardian now:

Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky:
They are John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), H. G. Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455), J. M. Barrie (286).

What of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes – alongside Max Beerbohm, it's pleasing to note).

Great War Fiction, where apparently somebody still reads this stuff, has some commentary:

Well, Galsworthy is still in print, and I’ve recommended the Forsyte Saga to my daughter as a good way of whiling away long cosy hours of breast-feeding. I don’t think he features on many academic reading lists, though. Wells and Bennett have their devoted followers, though there is more interest in Wells’s ideas than in his fiction, I think, and Bennett still seems to me the most under-appreciated of British novelists. Kipling is a great unignorable fact in English literature, but his name is at least as likely to produce vilification as praise. And Barrie and Walpole? Barrie is now a one-play man; Peter Pan continues to enchant, even when debased to panto. But have you tried any of his novels lately? The Little White Bird is positively creepy.

And Hugh Walpole, I fear, has quite disappeared from critical fame, and I can’t see him ever regaining it.

The list looks a little better once we get out of the Top Ten, with some more familiar names popping up:

George Moore - 165 votes
Bernard Shaw - 110 votes
Conan Doyle - 101 votes
R.H.Mottram - 79 votes
John Buchan - 63 votes
D.H.Lawrence - 61 votes
Chesterton - 60 votes
Aldous Huxley - 50 votes

Garnering only one vote is the still very popular P.G. Wodehouse. And getting absolutely no votes is a British writer who is far more widely read today than anyone else on this list: Agatha Christie.

Just yesterday I was reading a very good article by Eric D. Snider talking about the 50's John Wayne-John Ford western The Searchers, a middling hit when it was released that somehow morphed into a classic twenty-five years later. This largely unheralded film is now hailed as inspiration by two generations of filmmakers.

The fact is that books and movies that the popularity of a book or movie in it's 'moment' seems to have little bearing on its relevance to posterity. I think if you survey many of the landmark author with classic books that are a century old or older, you'll find that very few of them were immensely popular in their time. Many in fact toiled in near obscurity, only to be 'discovered' well after their deaths.

It's probable that there's a large element of chance in these things - if you're lucky some influential critic digs up one of your books thirty years after you're gone and gives it a new lease on life. There's no control over something like that.

But all the 'classic' literature tends to have a few things in common: either it deals in Big Themes or centers on some truly Memorable Characters. Stylistic choices, cultural relevance, progressive thinking - these generally don't speak to people fifty years on. They may sell books (or movies) at the time, but they also date those same works badly.

But who can really say what will stand the test of time?

How 'bout it? Anyone care to wager on what modern authors will still be read in 100 years time?

languages are hard, dammit!

2009-10-31T16:01:46Z

In Power of Babel John McWhorter has a beautiful term for the moment in acquiring a new language when you realize that this is going to be much harder than you thought: dammit! moments.

In learning any language on earth, we come to a point, often right at the outset, when we encounter something that from the perspective of our own language makes us think, "Dammit! How can anybody speak this every day?"

McWhorter argues that almost every language on earth is 'unnecessarily' complicated (there are a handful of exceptions, but I'll get to them in a moment). The truth is, a lot of the trappings we take for granted in European languages are unnecessary.

Anyone who has studied French or German has wondered why it's necessary to keep track of whether a table or an onion is a he or a she. Many languages have gendered nouns, although this appears to serve no functional purpose. But even where the features of a language have some functional use, they may not be strictly necessary. Tenses, for example. Many languages have them, but not all. And in fact you can get by without them based on context.

In English, we might say, "Yesterday, I was in my boat." 'Was' indicates that this occurred in the past. But wait, doesn't 'yesterday' also do that? In many languages, you would say "Yesterday, I am in my boat" with no loss of clarity.

There's an argument to be made for tenses, though, in that they can at least speed up the process of indicating when an event or action occurred. At least English avoids those grammatical constructions of really marginal utility, like reflexive verbs. Right?

Not so fast, dude. Remember our previous discussion about a, an and the? Yep, articles. Talk about marginal utility. Anyone who has ever spoken with a foreigner who hails from one of the (many) languages without articles will know that there's no piece of our language more likely to trip people up. Does it really matter whether it's "I took a bus to school" or "I took the bus to school"?

Every language has words to indicate specificity, and in fact our articles descended from the words for 'one' and 'that'. "I took that bus to school," "I took one bus to school." Linguistically, this is a much more common way of handling the problem of specificity, when it's actually needed. Why English feels the need to mark the specificity of almost every noun is almost as confusing as the whole gender fixation.

Of course, I suspect the real dammit! moment for foreign learners is realizing that English has no rhyme or reason when it comes to spelling and pronunciation. Poor bastards.

So, European languages are pretty complex beasts. Do you think that, on average, it would be safe to say that they tend to be MORE complex then, say, the languages of tribal bushmen? After all, our languages have had to evolve to suit the hurly-burly complexity of modern life. Surely people living in the forest participating in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle have no need for advanced linguistic complexes?

Maybe not, but McWhorter says that they have them anyway, and in spades. In fact, he claims that generally speaking the language of an isolated tribal group is likely to be much more complex then one of the 'Big Ten' languages. Often, the only word to describe the grammars that these groups deploy is 'baroque'. These small languages may employ a multitude of tones, nouns with dozens of genders, an array of verbs that are all entirely irregular, or 'word soup' word orders that make it difficult to figure out what's being said even when you have a word-for-word translation in front of you!

This seems counter intuitive at first. But the reason for it might come to you if you think about English as it's spoken in the ghettos of America. This dialect of English is famous for evolving very quickly and in very strange ways ("Fo shizzle my nizzle," anyone?). It's clear that the people who speak it enjoy this strange form of word invention, and this is often true of close-knit communities.

So, imagine a South American tribe that has been living in the mountain rain-forests for hundreds of years, with little or no contact with any other people. They have no reason to teach their language to anyone from the outside world. And being in constant contact with each other allows them to participate in the kind of word-play and invention that human beings seem to have an endless taste for. Over time their language will take on so many layers and odd branches that it may well remain virtually unintelligible to any intrepid translator who might find his way into their jungle.

McWhorter refers to this as "language as an inside joke," which I think communicates the idea here pretty succinctly.

Meanwhile, back in the wider world, the "Big 10" languages are continually undergoing a process of simplification. Their requirement that they be teachable to non-native speakers means that they are constantly being 'sanded down', made simpler and more consistent. Not enough, alas, to get rid of articles and noun genders, but at least enough to keep the irregular verbs to a minimum and the word order relatively straightforward.

So, strangely the large, widely-spoken languages are usually simpler than small, obscure ones.

But they've still got plenty of dammit! moments in store for the unwary learner.

The only exceptions to the dammit! rule are new languages. McWhorter spends a chapter on pidgins and creoles, because these unique products of colonization and globalization give us a lot of insight into the fundamentals of language.

Very briefly, when two groups of people who don't speak the same language meet, they often develop a 'pidgin' to communicate in. Pidgins are extremely basic, invented on the spur of the moment to facilitate simple communication. They tend to involve the simplest parts of both languages. Any shades of complexity are thrown to the wayside.

But a pidgin is not a complete language. It lacks a real grammar and doesn't have a wide-enough vocabulary to encapsulate all concepts. But sometimes, if contact between the two groups is sustained, like it was when the Europeans started colonizing Southeast Asia, the pidgin grows into a full language. We call these languages creoles.

When a creole is born, it's like a brand new language. It tends to be very, very simple grammatically and have few linguistic 'curlicues'. Creoles usually have a word order of subject-verb-noun. Verbs have no tense. Short words known as 'particles' usually proceed the verbs to modify them and give them a tense.

While of course creoles carry some features of the languages that spawned them, these features are often very simple, and they rapidly evolve beyond the recognition of speakers of the original languages. For instance, in Tok Pisin, "em bai go long maket" translates as, "she will go to market." Were you able to get that from that sentence? Tok Pisin is an English creole!

In his epilogue, McWhorter discusses the possibility of reconstructing the 'ur language', Adam and Eve's tongue from which all others are presumably descended. Alas, given thousands of years of history and the random, haphazard fashion in which languages change he concludes that this endeavor is extremely unlikely to succeed. We can't know what the first language sounded like.

But the interesting thing is that new creoles give us a pretty good idea of how that first language's grammar probably worked. The language features listed above are common to creoles across a wide swath of peoples, cultures and geographies. There does seem to be some consistency in the way that new languages are created. They start simple with a basic word order and particle-modified verbs, and then over time they evolve (often spectacularly!) in complexity and nuance.

So Adam and Eve probably spoke a relatively simple language, but they're not around today to tell us how it sounded. It's probably just as well, though.

I imagine that if they had to learn English, they'd pretty quickly find themselves slapping their foreheads and saying "Dammit! How can anyone speak this way?!"

this island english

2009-10-29T22:03:05Z

When I first moved The Netherlands, the language experience was somewhat disorienting. As I listened to everyone around me rattle on in Dutch, I felt as though I was on the verge of comprehension. If I could just listen a little harder, just pay attention a little more, the language would suddenly 'come into focus' and I would understand it.

Alas, that elusive comprehension remained over the horizon for many months of hard study.

But it's perhaps not surprising I felt this way. John McWhorter states in The Power of Babel that Dutch is probably the closest language to English, especially Old English.

Unfortunately, English isn't close to Old English. In fact true English words make up only about 1% of the modern English language! All the rest are imports from Old Norse, Norman French, Greek and of course Latin, not to mention bits and pieces from virtually every other culture we've ever come into contact with.

Grammatically, English remains in the Germanic family. But alas for us English speakers, it is really all alone in a class by itself. McWhorter says that that's what makes life hard for English-speaking natives when they decide to acquire a second language.

My experience in Amsterdam was that a native German speaker could be conversant in Dutch within about two months of arriving. McWhorter says that Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are so similar that they are really different dialects rather than languages. And a Dutch or German speaker would find many familiar things in them and acquire them rapidly.

Likewise, Spanish speakers are well on their way to speaking Italian and Portuguese. Even French, the odd-ball of the Romance languages, will come quickly, because for all its strange sounds it uses the same fundamental grammar and word-order.

Meanwhile, the English speaker who wants to learn a Germanic language finds that the core of the language is somewhat familiar. Those few Old English words that we have left are almost all important ones: a, an and the, and itself, the pronouns, words like water and old, and our irregular verbs, esp. the many odd forms of to be all have their roots in Old English.

Learning Dutch I was gratified to find that it had articles in common with English. Having articles of speech is actually a bit odd for languages in general, but Germanic languages tend to have them: an and the correspond nicely to een and het* in Dutch, for example. Also nice: if a verb is irregular in English, it's also probably irregular in Dutch, although probably in a different way. But at least you know what to look for.

So picking up the core of a Germanic language isn't too bad, but after that it gets hard. They treat complex verbs rather differently and the 'high level' language is completely alien. We use virtually no OE words for complex, multi-syllabic words, so unless one is lucky to find that the Germanic language in question also cribbed from Latin (occasionally the case in Dutch) then one is going to be doing a lot of rote memorization for several years just to read the newspaper.

Try and learn a Romance language, and the situation is reversed. The 'core words' are completely alien, as we don't use the Latin-descended words for 'is', 'love' or 'fish' in Modern English. Once you get into the higher-level language, though, the Latin-based suffixes and prefixes should be familiar. But conjugating those verbs and keeping track of noun gender is probably never going to come easily.

It's strange that English has taken such a separate path from other European languages. And while it's certainly not unusual for a language to take on outside words, for a language to be overwhelmed by them to the degree that English has been has certainly set it apart.

There is good news, at least for our great-great-grandchildren. Given English's momentum as the global lingua franca, it's likely that it will be with us and heard around the world for a long time. And when it does evolve into one or more different languages, well, hopefully our descendants will have a leg up on them from having spoken our unique mother tongue.

* I know it looks like a misspelled the, but it actually is closer kin to it.

why can't we all just speak english?

2009-10-27T18:40:23Z

I might have mentioned earlier that I am currently reading a really brilliant book by John McWhorter called The Power of Babel - A Natural History of Language. If you have any kind of interest in language, you really need to get ahold of a copy.

Broadly, this book concerns itself with understanding what language is and how languages evolve and change over time. It also is a survey of not just the English language at its relatives but of the vast diversity of languages that span the globe. You'll encounter the strange, the baroque and the bizarre with languages like Fula, Swahili, Cantonese, Javanese and others. But even as he's holding the oddities of these tongues up to the light, McWhorter is always careful to explain how they got that way. And the explanations will change your conception of what a language is.

Here's a brief breakdown of the book. See if it doesn't intrigue you -

Introduction - Where did languages begin, and when, and what's so special about them anyway?
1) The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones - This chapter demonstrates the specific kinds of changes that languages can undergo over the course of time, especially the 'erosion' of language that always seems to be happening. It explains why this process is inevitable.
2) The Six Thousand Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages - One of the author's major points is that there is no such thing as a language, really. All languages are dialects: interrelated, constantly evolving and impossible to truly untangle into discrete 'languages'.
3) The Thousands of Dialects Mix with One Another - The author continues to illustrate the point that 'language' and 'dialect' are not separate things, by surveying a remarkably wide array of 'languages' and 'dialects' and showing the surprising ways in which they are similar... and different.
4) Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones - This chapter examines pidgins and creoles, the special cases of language that dramatically illustrate the human capacity for linguistic expression.
5) The Thousands of Dialects of Thousands of Languages All Developed Far Beyond the Call of Duty - The flip-side of the first chapter: if languages are always eroding, they are also always becoming more complex. This chapter examines the whys and hows of the many odd and over-complicated features of languages.
6) Some Languages Get Genetically Altered and Frozen - One can't deny that literature, education and technology have had a serious impact on many modern languages. This chapter examines the nuts and bolts of those effects.
7) Most of the World's Languages Went Extinct - We are losing languages all the time. This effect has been exacerbated by globalization, but has in fact been going on for thousands of years. Discusses the whys and what can be done.
Epilogue: "Extra, Extra! The Language of Adam and Eve!" - If all languages descended from a single, original language, what can we know about that language? Is it possible to reconstruct it?

This book is chock full of moist tidbits. If you've ever wanted to know why all those European languages have genders for their nouns, where the heck tonal languages came from, why it's so hard for native English speakers to learn other languages and why Charlie Brown is bald (he's only eight years old!) then you need to read this book. Although it's dry in parts, it never gets too technical and the author's rather random illustrations and pop-culture references (see the Charlie Brown bit) are engaging.

Since I'm so taken with it at the moment I'm sure I'll be blogging further about it. But you really should take a look for yourself.

conversation killers/starters

2009-10-26T21:20:19Z

How to make any statement creepy: add "...ladies" to the end.

Ex: "When's the next flight out... ladies?"

How to make any statement insulting: add "...even for you" to the end.

Ex: "This banana split is pretty good... even for you."

How to jump into a conversation when you don't know what the topic is: break in at any interval of silence with, "But where do you draw the line?"

no societal immunity

2009-10-26T13:33:45Z

Via Freakonomics -

Wired has profiled Paul Offit, the inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, and his ongoing battles with the anti-vaccination crusade, who have selected him as one of the unofficial villains of their movement. Some have gone so far as to label him a "biostitute."

Personally, I find the label "biostitute" extremely unwieldy. Even "bio whore" would be catchier. I think that the movement's propaganda team needs to go back to the drawing board on that one.

There are a lot of interesting issues here: human perception of risk, the workings of the pharmaceutical industry, knowledge and the internet, etc. But I think the most interesting question is this: given that we're a large, ordered society of people living in close proximity together, where do we draw the line in requiring people to participate in things like vaccinations?

Because arguably people who forgo vaccinations put more then themselves at risk. They are also risking their entire community. As the article points out, a non-vaccinated person in a group of vaccinated people can actually be more risky to someone who is vaccinated, but whose vaccination has not 'taken'. This is a condition that cannot be identified ahead of time.

More broadly, large swaths of unvaccinated population could allow diseases that have been almost eradicated to run rampant.

At the same time, there's something deeply distasteful about forcing anyone to inject something into their body.

What do you think?

multiple endings

2009-10-22T14:42:52Z

For our last Bad Movie Night, we watched Clue, which several of us had never seen. I rather enjoyed it. I thought the writing was hilarious and the character acting by the large ensemble cast was pitch-perfect.

Of course famously the film has three endings, all of which we watched. Even though the third ending is, in my opinion, far and away the most plausible and satisfying, I find the concept of multiple endings to be pretty intriguing.

I mean think about it. Imagine seeing Clue in 1985, knowing nothing about the multiple-ending gimmick. You catch the film on a Wed. night, and then at work the next day you start discussing with your coworker. "Man, I totally knew that Miss Scarlett did it," you say. "Are you kidding?!?" he retorts, "it was Mrs. Peacock!"

The discussion which ensued before the two of you straightened things out would be fascinating.

Sadly, as far as my Googling can turn up, people going into the theater probably knew there were multiple endings as the gimmick was part of the marketing. That's a missed opportunity for a unique social experiment, as far as I'm concerned!

Maybe the time is ripe to try it for real.

The fact is, it's fairly common for a film to have multiple endings. Many, many films get reshoots after initial test screenings. When audiences react badly to an ending, it's not uncommon for the studio to demand that a new one be cut together. (Going strictly by DVD special features, it's my experience that these changes are virtually always for the better, studio interference notwithstanding.)

Meanwhile, international and foreign films are sometimes released with actual multiple endings. It's not unheard of for a film that had an ambiguous or downer ending in its original release to turn up in the US with a happy ending, at least of sorts.

If you've ever watched the 'alternate ending' on your special edition DVD, the changes in tone that a new ending supplies can be striking. A different ending can change a film from a cerebral thriller to a frenetic action flick. It can have you leaving the theater with a sense of confusion or an air of satisfaction. It can be the line between whether a film was brilliant or absurd.

The ending is the last thing you see in the movie, so it is going to have a disproportionate impact on how you perceive the tone of a movie. If the ending has a disproportionate amount of action, you're more inclined to think of what you've just seen as an 'action movie'. If the ending is happy, you're more inclined to label the movie as 'upbeat', even if everything that came before was doldrums and depression.

Even more importantly, for many films, is that the ending explains or interprets the rest of the film. Clue is of course a sterling example of this. There are three different explanations for the events that lead up to the climax, and three different reinterpretations of the characters involved.

Finally, and I think this is of paramount importance, the ending decides the themes of the film. Every story is a problem in search of a resolution. How that resolution is achieved is thematically significant. A story where all the bad guys get what's coming to them has strong themes of good versus evil and justice. This is a world where morality triumphs, the world that we all, theoretically, want to live in.

Take the same story, but now the good guys are killed too. Now you have themes of sacrifice and you find yourself living in a more tragic world. And then sometimes the story ends with the bad guys winning, or people just dying at random. These stories tend to ponder existential themes - who are we? Do we really matter? What does it mean to be human?

These are just a few examples. There are many different possibly themes to a story, and even more endings that get you there. But the point is that tweaking an ending even slightly could radically alter our perception of a movie.

I think it would be very cool for someone to release a movie that really played with that. Shoot two or three different endings and send different prints to different theaters. Don't tell anyone that you're doing it. Watch the confusion that results.

The key would be to make the endings differ in subtle ways: reordering key events, or emphasizing different things. I think a straight up happy ending versus sad ending would be too obvious, too quickly figured out. Likewise an ending where everyone turned out to be space aliens or where it was all a dream. Keep it subtle, just enough to twist the viewers' perceptions and expectations of the film they just saw.

Then see what people have to say.

Audience Participation: What kind of ending do you like best. Which was your favorite ending to Clue?

brave new album

2009-10-21T23:37:02Z

I'm quite honestly still getting my head around the new Muse album - "The Resistance" sounds at first blush like its half a Queen tribute album and half the soundtrack to a seventies sci-fi film. But of all people, Strange Horizons has reviewed it and declared that its all of a piece.

Anyway, possibly you should read the review if only for the novelty of a SF-short magazine reviewing a rock album.

limitations of the long form

2009-10-21T22:52:18Z

I am still ploughing through Katherine Kerr's Deverry series (which I wrote about here and here). I'm on, what, the twelfth book? Thirteenth? I am losing count. At any rate, there's only a couple to go, and one of those unpublished as yet.

Katherine Kerr continues to work her page-turning ensorclement on me. I just can't put these things down. I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly why, although I have some theories.

One possibility is that in these books there is always something interesting happening. At any given point there is an expectation of several different plot threads that might be resolved at any moment.

Another reason is that the books just flow so seamlessly. The author does not cross-cut between plot-lines, as so many modern authors do. This is a practice which, at least for me, tends to break the tension and encourage me to put a book down and go check the laundry. None of that here.

A third reason is very simple: no chapter breaks. It's insidious and it's tricky, but it works! Kerr's books have sections (usually One and Two), but no further convenient signposts or stopping points for the reader. Tricky, yet ingenious!

That said, I am getting slightly less enamored of these later books. A certain world-weariness seems to grip all the characters. Not that this has ever been a series about shiny, happy people but I could do with a little less existential angst. The series seems in general darker and less joyful. Meanwhile many of my favorite characters have died off and the ones that remain, well, they don't endear themselves to me with their frequent stupid decision making.

I'm still scratching my head over why I'm supposed to like the female wizard who left her husband for an arrogant elf-spirit.

The funny thing is, I don't find that these flaws are specific to Kerr's series in particular. This disenchantment seems to follow me into any series that runs longer than three or four books. Or really, any long-form storytelling at all - I don't think I've stayed with many TV shows past their third season (sorry 'Lost', sorry 'House).

Of course the obvious explanation is that familiarity breeds contempt. Even the shiniest, most original new author will repeat themselves over time. Eventually the unique stylistic flourishes or cleverly deployed plot devices or endearing characterizations seem old hat, and we begin to see the man behind the curtain, as it were. Certainly, that's a factor.

But another thing I've noticed is that authors who write long-lasting series seem to have trouble resisting the urge to 'go dark'. Each book in a series feels a bit more grim then the last. There are fewer moments of levity, catharsis gets harder to find, and vanquishing the villains seems to come at a higher and higher cost. Meanwhile the characters get more flawed, more world-weary, more mired in existential angst.

On the one hand, it seems realistic, right? Maybe these are just signs of a maturing author, one less willing to take the easy out and cook up a false happy ending. Fair enough. Real life is hard, and short on happy endings.

But, if you want to talk realism, you should consider the positives too: humans are remarkable in their ability to adapt to difficult situations and to draw strength and joy from little things. People who go through difficult times do pick up scars, but they also often learn and grow and become more themselves, in some sense.

But my sense is that it isn't a question of characters becoming more 'real'. Rather, over time authors have a tendency to turn their characters into sounding boards for their own personal philosophies and into soapboxes for their pet issues. Which is within their rights, I suppose, but possibly detrimental to the reader's enjoyment. Loyal readers will stick with you 'til the end, no matter who you kill off and what Obvious Parallels you draw between your world and the real world. But there are some of us who silently shake our heads and turn away and go find newer stories to enter into.

In Kerr's case, she hasn't quite driven me away yet. And with only two books left, she's going to have to try really hard at this point. Plus, she keeps adding dragons to the story, and I'm just a sucker for that.

Audience Participation: I am curious if other people tend to get disenchanted by long-form serial stories. And if so, why?

Captain Jack takes a ride

2009-10-19T15:42:39Z

Saturday it was gorgeous again - cool weather, blue skies, the complete package. Joel suggested that we drive down to St. Augustine in the evening. He wanted to try out his new digital SLR. Evening light and scenic environs would make for a photographer's dream.

We set out with his wife Erin and eventually found ourselves in the well-tended garden in front of the Lightner Museum. We wound up taking lots of great portraits of Erin, Erin and Joel, and even a decent one of yours truly, but I think the best photo of the day came early on.

St. Augustine, being a pretty serious tourist attraction, boasts a lot of costumed street entertainers. You don't often catch them on their way to (or from?) work. But as Joel was setting up his tripod in front of the Lightner, I looked up in time to see the fellow below cruising up to the stoplight.

"Joel, bring your camera!" I barked. Joel wrenched it off the tripod and ran up to the street. "Wave!" he shouted to the man on the crotch-rocket.

The man waved.

Joel took a picture.