Ken's Blog

As I have mentioned here before, there is quite a bit of evidence that natural language is evolved not by adults, but by children under the age of eight. In a way, this is not so surprising, since any temporary change in grammar or usage that is not learnable by little children simply does not become a persistent part of the language.

We are not talking here about specialized technical “languages” and vocabularies, as these are not part of natural language. Rather, we are discussing the elements that all natural languages have in common, such as tense, case, deictics (words like “this” and “that”), and consistent ordering of subject, predicate and object.

I was talking with a colleague today, and we were musing whether a kid’s game could be deliberately designed so as to provoke an evolution of natural language. Imagine something as popular as Minecraft, but designed with a specific agenda to evolve language itself.

If such a thing could be done, it could be put to interesting uses. For example, as kids with those modified linguistic abilities grow up, they might be able to communicate with each other in ways that would seem to us like magic.

Of course it’s quite likely that something this is already happening without any deliberate design, and that we simply haven’t yet developed the right kind of tools to see it.

I had quite the panic yesterday when I realized that my blog wasn’t working anymore. I couldn’t put up any new posts, and people were telling me that their comments weren’t showing up.

Fortunately, it just turned out to be a problem with my database. When I started this blog in January 2008, the size allocation for my databases was 100MB. That figure seems so paltry now.

I looked on-line and discovered that I’ve used up 150MB. At 50MB over quota, a hard limit had kicked in.

So I called my service provider, and got some good news: In the intervening six and a half years, storage technology has advanced considerably. They told me to start a new database and transfer everything over. The allocation for these databases is now up to 1024MB — a cool gigabyte!

Assuming I keep posting every day, at roughly the same rate of data usage, I now have enough space to burn through another 900MB before hitting a wall.

That’s going to happen, by my calculations, in about thirty nine years from now. I hope that I’ll still be around to blog then, and that you’ll still be around to read what I have to say.

But why take any chances? Let’s check in with each other around 2053, and see how it’s going.

I’m currently reading one of those edge-of-the-seat science fiction books in which some rapidly mutating bacterial life form unexpectedly achieves sentience, and then goes on to form vast microscopic colonies which band together into a hyper-intelligent swarm that decimates our population and threatens to wipe out the entire human race.

I don’t know about you, but I hate when that happens.

With this alarming scenario still rattling around in my head, I went for a walk to Whole Foods this evening to pick up some upscale groceries (because that’s the only kind they have). Since it happens to be a beautiful Saturday evening in Greenwich Village, along the way I passed crowds of happy people wandering about.

And I found myself greatly relieved that everyone is ok. I know it sounds silly to say it, but we are all so fortunate to be here, just hanging out and enjoying our lives, in our obliviously unapocalyptic way.

Sometimes there’s nothing quite like a good literary biodystopia, to make you appreciate the simple things.

This evening I had a wonderful time catching up with my writer friend. Andy is a screenwriter, which means he is mainly to be found in the vicinity of Hollywood, California.

But every once in a while he wanders east, and then we have hours-long talks about stories, movies, character arcs, plot ideas and all the minutiae that go into telling a great tale.

We analyze actors, directors, compare different screenplays by the same writer, argue over which P.T. Anderson film is the best one, and marvel at the one great role/performance that some otherwise mediocre actors always seem to find.

People are different, and we all wear different hats, depending upon who we are with. With my political friends, computer programming friends, classical music friends, new media theory friends or SciFi/Dr. Who/Buffy/Fringe/XMen friends I have very different sorts of things to chat about.

But with Andy I get to have my “writer friends” conversations, and they are always glorious.

Today my fancy new Macbook Air arrived, and I spent much of the day happily loading files onto it, configuring the editor and the shell just the way I like them, and then jumping in and writing software.

I am remembering to savor this moment, when my new brand computer is completely awesome, and speedy, and capacious, and just about perfect in every way.

For soon it will just be my computer, and then one day it will be my old computer, and then all too soon the sad day will arrive when it will be that old computer I used to have.

Alas, computer years are to dog years as dog years are to people years.

But for now it is my shiny new toy.

And the two word challenge continues! This time my friend specified not two words, but rather a word and a two-word phrase (hence the title of this post).

But the challenge remains the same — to spin these words into a tale. Below is the story I came up with this time.

-KP

_______ 

“My love is like a red balloon.” he smiled sweetly at her as he said it, although he needed to lean closer in his chair for her to hear him over the party music.

She shook her head. “Thanks for the compliment, but that’s not right. What Robert Burns actually wrote in 1794 was ‘My love is like a red red rose’. Wait, how can you be getting that wrong?”

He looked puzzled. “I could swear those were the words.”

“Look,” she said, “your typical modern latex balloon is made by refining natural rubber through a process that wasn’t even perfected until 1931…”

“Yes, I know,” he said, rolling his eyes. “the Tilly Cat balloons, made by Neil Tillotson in his attic. Everybody knows that. What’s your point?”

“The point, dear, is that you said ‘red balloon’ instead of ‘red red rose’, and 1931 happened a lot later than 1794. I mean really, you might want to get your Google Chip checked.”

He snorted. “My Google Chip is just fine thank you. Don’t you like it when I say sweet things to you?”

“Oh yes, most definitely. It’s just that sometimes you say the weirdest stuff since your last upgrade. But feel free to woo me any time.”

“OK, then,” he said, “Shall I compare thee to a red balloon? Thou art more lovely and more temperate…”

“Now wait a minute,” she said, “that is not what Mr. Shakespeare said. Even Faraday’s original balloon in 1824 was a distinctly post-Elizabethan development.”

“So you’re saying I’ve got my facts wrong? But that’s impossible — nobody ever gets their facts wrong. That’s the whole point of … Oh, wait!”

“What?” she was eyeing him curiously now.

“They’re playing that song I really like, you know, the English version. It was a big hit for that 1980′s German singer Nena. What’s it called again — 99 something.”

“Oh, whatever,” she smiled at him. “You are totally useless, and that’s why I love you.” She kissed him on the lips and pulled him to his feet. “Let’s shut up and dance.”

I attended a little workshop recently that mainly consisted of a series of talks by the participants. Most of these talks were simply wonderful — cogent and to the point, possessing a well defined and useful message, and extremely useful to the other attendees.

But one talk was a complete train wreck. Long, rambling, without sensible visuals, much of it seemed to be without purpose. By half way through, the rest of us realized we were trapped. The speaker apparently had no awareness of the listeners, no sense of a narrative arc, and — most importantly — seemingly no idea whatsoever that an audience’s time is valuable.

Before getting up to the front of the room, this speaker had given a little disclaimer about having needed to prepare at the last minute. But that’s really no excuse. If you are not sure what to say, it is *not* acceptable to making your speech three times longer on the theory that somewhere within the dross will be something useful.

I am reminded of the famous quote by Blaise Pascal in a 1657 letter: “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” The difference is that when a letter writer goes on and on about very little, you can skip to the end. When the same thing happens in a speech, the entire audience becomes painfully trapped.

Settling back home after several months away, I have been getting back into my morning exercise routine — half an hour of exercise followed by a really healthy breakfast. This has certainly put me in a much better mood, and full of energy to face the day.

And completely turned off to junk food. As my body gets rid of the accumulated poisons from months on end of far too much travel and far too little exercise, I am sleeping better, eating better, and feeling full of energy all day.

But I’ve noticed something else as well. All sort of old disagreements, and fallings out with former friends and others from my past, have been bubbling up to my consciousness in the last few days. I find myself reliving heated arguments with people who are long out of my life. Except that now I am seeing these arguments, in the light of day, for the pointless circular mental traps they always were.

I think my mind is expelling its poisons as well — airing out and dispelling long brooding resentments that have been lurking in the dark corners of my soul. And I guess this makes sense, since body and mind are two parts of a single integrated whole.

As the body begins to heal itself, so does the mind.

Being human, we inevitably see the world around us through the prism of human perception. Our minds pick out faces and bodies, hands, smiles. We intuitively map natural phenomena like fire, rolling hills, howling winds to emotions we understand, such as rage, peacefulness and despair.

Yet if an intelligent creature were to arrive on our planet from somewhere else in the galaxy, much of what we perceive would seem alien indeed to this visitor. This hypothetical being might have no equivalent to faces and bodies. And our human version of emotion — a legacy of our evolutionary heritage — might be equally foreign to such a being.

I know there is no easy answer to this question, but I wonder what it would be like to view the world with an intelligence that is not a human intelligence. Would there be a fundamental difference? Would certain objects that fascinate humans — fire, mountains, trees and clouds — become essentially invisible, whereas others would assume an importance that would be beyond our comprehension?

I wonder whether it would be possible to do a rough exobiological mapping of perception: Creatures like this tend to see the world around them like that. Unfortunately such a mapping is likely to remain conjectural, since we don’t have many data points.

Although I suspect that the most intelligent of our fellow species, such as the dolphins and the elephants, may see the world in ways that are interestingly different from the way we see it.