Philosophony

time flies then you're sleepin' in

2007-03-10T10:12:00.000-08:00

we waste more time sleeping than in any other single activity. it seems rather than trying to cheat death, we should focus our efforts on cheating sleep, adding a third again to our lifetimes. let's discuss.

define: civil war

2007-02-04T20:40:00.000-08:00

The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq states that the country is indeed going through what they define as 'civil war.' No shit. Why has it taken this long for the term to catch on? Perhaps because it conjures up images of Confederate and Union soldiers dying in droves. Well, yeah, that's what's going on in Iraq, only there are a lot more civilians dying too. Somebody should've thought this through. I blame the entire administration for the oversight. Even if someone lower down had thought it through and was silenced, they should've come forth to the press to shine a guiding light on our understanding of the inner workings of the hypocracy (as in a form of gov't) going on in Washington.

Dang, I'm glad I moved away from that {insert higher power of choice}-forsaken place...

climate change vs. global warming

2007-02-02T17:36:00.000-08:00

those who like to deny global warming have spent the last 5-10 years rebranding the notion as climate change, which lends the concept a possible reading that the change is natural, not human-induced. well, today's presentation by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that there is a 90% chance that "climate change" is due to the obsessive urning of fossil fuels. you know, all our driving about, and the power plants that let these computer servers run... this makes Google a prime agent of climate change. yippie!

however, those who've been calling it climate change have also inadventantly allowed a reading which accounts for other changes -- not only are parts of the world warming, but precipitation and other patterns have been shifting to the more extreme -- places which have been dry are drier than normal, places which have been wetter are becoming even more so. so, go ahead and call it climage change -- as long as you keep the "global" modifier -- global climate change -- you're right! that's a more accurate term than merely "global warming" since it's not only the temperature but also the other meteorological components that are rapidly shifting all 'cause of us, and all over the world. yippie!

more heat waves and increased flooding to come!

watch out!

2007-01-26T16:07:00.001-08:00

there are philosophonies all over the place ... even in the academy!

mimetic memetics

2007-01-26T14:21:00.000-08:00

the study of the repetition and propagation of mimicry.

that's all we are, by our very natures. just look at language -- using other people's words to say something unique? come on, mahn! just how original do you think you are? wear a toupee and a turban, you're just like someone else. dance a jig and a polka, you're just like someone else. there is freedom only in submission, the giving of yourself to the great monopoly; everything else is total child's panoply.

we're stuck in the gene pool, and i gotta pee!

i dunno, tho -- we're all just aggregators and syndicators. alligators and crocks! allegory and crooks!

this is why philosophy is so phony. formalisms come and go, are replaced, subdued, misused, abused, confused, like strung out children on the street. we need a new mode of thought that's not bound to the given words of a language. mathematics could be the universal grammar. If only such assimilation doesn't bring about the end of our humanity, or humanity as a whole as we know it.

there's a to everything, especially patience!

data sparsity / data-starved

2007-01-26T00:30:00.001-08:00

there is so much data in the world, and so much of it is useless to me.

there are only so many studies i can imagine in the still of the night. we need more annotated data or an improvement in unsupervised learning techniques. in the meantime, there are simplistic nlp techniques out there that include/provide visualizations to help us discover and measure linguistic phenomena.

see http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/ for interesting views into various corpora. For an example of a tool that allows you to expore past state of the union addresses, see this nytimes link. i particularly like the visualization. dang, i need to tinker with flash amd ajax more, so i can provide similar views of situation entities, dialogue acts, discourse relations, named entities, coreference chains, etc in documents. what the heck, these sort of tools might bring more attention to the applications of computational linguistics in the hands of everyday people. that could really push the field forward in ways that researchers could really benefit, financially and intellectually.

in my recent reading, there are so many evaluation metrics for unsupervised learning, some of which provide pleasant results, and others of which that do not. it seems researchers like to choose their evaluation measures to optimize their results. there need to be better eval metrics. there simply must be.

verb classes

2007-01-22T00:19:00.000-08:00

in my recent linguistics reading i've come across empirical methods for classifying verbs into clusters based on the contexts in which they occur. essentially this boils down to using surface sytactic constraints to hint at underlying semantic constraints. fascinating.

i wonder if verbs can be classified as those which can undergo VP ellipsis and those which cannot. for instance,

digging in and digging out

we do not say

digging in and out

to convey the same meaning. i wonder if this restriction is based on an idiomatic or metaphoric use of the verbs. i shall have to explore this.

get up and walk out

2007-01-15T03:38:00.000-08:00

i'm the kid who got up and left during your into to philosophy class on the work of lao-tsu, having read his (translated and thus likely butchered) words to the effect of "those who know don't say." i was also reading a lot of walt whitman at the time -- poems like "when i heard the learned astronomer":

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

i had a great extra-long, circuitous walk back to the dorms, thought about god's great gift to the world, smoked some pot with some friends, played some guitar and giggled myself to sleep. at 32, my days are much the same, only the green leaves have been replaced by decaffeinated tea ^_^

this means if you read this blog, you'll get a second-rate education in philosophy. it could be worse -- i could assign 200 pages of nietzsche!