Hyperbo-news

Suppose that another driver cut me off on the road this morning, and I had to hit my brakes to avoid a collision. Not unusual, of course; this happens to everyone, all the time. Most of us mutter some unkind epithet. But what would you think if I should describe it by saying, “My car was almost smashed to pieces this morning!” ?

Or how about if the last time I had a head cold, after I recovered I told everyone, “I almost died last week!” ?

Well, you’d call it hyperbole, of course: obvious exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Every one of us does it seventeen million times a day.

Oops; there I go again.

So, then, how about when the news media report that on Christmas day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab “almost brought down a Northwest Airlines jetliner”? I’ve seen that and many similar statements in newspapers and on television news, over the last few days. But how close is “almost”? How far from actuality can we get before “almost” is inappropriate? And do we want the news media engaging in hyperbole?

To its credit, the New York Times isn’t using those sorts of characterizations. The Times tells us that “the man wanted to bring the plane down,” attributing that statement to federal officials. Saying that he wanted to do it is very different from saying that it almost happened. DHS officials say that what he had was “more incendiary than explosive,” and question “whether at the end of the day he had the ability to do” what he set out to.

Unfortunately, hyperbole sells, and many news outlets aren’t shy about that.

[Back when Richard Reid had his day, a friend of mine noted the new requirement to doff our shoes, and said it was a good thing he hadn’t tried to ignite his underwear, or we’d all be flying naked soon. Perhaps that’s turned out to be prophetic.]

Grandma and Grandpa

What did (or do) you call your grandparents? Did you have different names for your maternal grandparents and your paternal ones? Did you have particularly odd or “cute” names for them?

Most people do have different names for the different sets. I called my father’s parents “Grandma” and “Grandpa”. My mother’s parents were “Nanny” and “Poppy”, and my step-mother’s were “Mom-mom” and “Pop”. It’s convenient that it worked out that way, since all those names had been decided on before I was in the picture.

Actually, what I’ve had trouble with is distinguishing my birth mother from my step mother, at those times when the distinction is significant — usually, it’s not. The term “birth mother” often connotes adoption, which wasn’t the case with me. “Natural mother” sounds a bit odd. I tried “real mother” briefly, but that makes it seem that she who’s been “Mom” to me for the last 40 years is somehow not “real”; nothing could be less true. As I say, I’m happy that I seldom have to make the distinction clear.

When I was in high school, I had a friend who called his mother’s parents “Nana” and “Gomp”, the latter being how he said it as a baby. It seemed funny, at the time, to hear a teenager call his grandfather “Gomp”, but, well, these things stick, don’t they? I’ve also heard a lot of “Grandma Sarah” or “Grandpa Smith” used to make the distinction.

Of course, it’s convenient for the family to know which grandmother you’re talking about, so it’s sensible to have distinct names. But I think the need goes beyond that: we often attach much more to a name, treating it as more than just a label. Small children often have trouble accepting that the person just introduced can really be “Michael”, because Michael is someone else, a friend down the street. And we’ve all heard people say things like, “He doesn’t seem like a ‘Steve’.”

Societies, from ancient to modern ones, have used different names for the same people, reserving particular names for limited use, not to be worn out. Names can be considered unlucky, or be explicitly cursed; there are all sorts of superstitions around names. Don’t say the name of a devil or demon, lest it respond to the call. And, of course, never mention the name of God.

But Shakespeare wrote, in Romeo and Juliet, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; so Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title.” And indeed: I’d be the same person as I am now, even if I weren’t called Barry.^[1] Superstitions aside, my name hasn’t had any part in shaping my character.

How different cultures treat names is interesting. A Latin-American parent will happily name a boy Jesus (pronounced “hay-soos”), but that’s not done in Anglo culture. In The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, writer Alexander McCall Smith shows us African culture in Botswana, giving us characters with names like Precious, Happy, and Lucky. We like those names for what they are... but don’t we also hope the character of the name, as a word, will imbue itself on the bearer?

Where did all this come from? Why do we attach such importance to what things in general, and people, in particular, are called?

You can call me anything, except late for supper.

— Saying from rural America

---

^[1] Had I been a girl, my parents had prepared “Barbara” for me.

Apple service follow-up

I got my repaired MacBook back yesterday, and I’m back in business again — one week without the machine, instead of the possible two weeks. That matches the long end of the second-tier IBM service, and isn’t too bad. In the end, the service went well, and the cost was reasonable.

They also did not wipe my hard drive, and that’s as I expected. But they did change some (but not all) of the settings back to factory defaults. I don’t like the illuminated keyboard, for instance, and I have it turned off; it was back on. My alternative keyboard selections had been turned off (I use the US extended keyboard, and also have some other keyboards enabled so that I can occasionally type a word or two in a language such as русский, ελληνική, or עברית. I have the boot-process default set to be verbose, and that had been turned off. On the other hand, the options for things like desktop, exposé, and spaces were as I’d set them.

And, of course, I have no idea whether they might have made a copy of the data on my hard drive, which is the most troublesome aspect, and the reason one should want to avoid sending one’s drive out. I understand that they want my hard drive so that they can make sure the repaired machine works with my drive, and they can update my software if the repair requires a software change (perhaps an updated driver for a newer version of the system board).

So, my two main complaints are still there: I was not offered an overnight replacement option, even for an extra fee, and I wasn’t given any option where I could keep my own hands on my hard drive. Next time, I’ll try Jim’s suggestion of going to an authorized service shop other than the Apple store. And this time, I look forward to being surveyed about it.

Venomous dinosaurs? How scientists disagree.

One criticism of science that we often hear is...

Wait.

You know, criticism of science is still a phrase that seems odd to me. When I was growing up, we never thought to criticize science, in general. Of course, there’d be things that scientists got wrong, and we were critical of those as individual items. But that, we knew, is how science is — we’re always learning new things about what we thought we knew. It’s a strength of science.

Science was what had been moving us forward, and would continue to do. In the “space age”, we could thank science for advances like safer, more efficient transportation; better medical knowledge and, thus, better health and longer life; radio and television; worldwide communication. We never thought to criticize science as a whole.

But such criticism seems fashionable now, in a world where many arm for a battle of God versus science, where some consider the quest for knowledge to be evil, where a president convinced us that applying new information and revising our analysis is a weakness rather than a strength.

And so, one criticism of science that we often hear is that scientists disagree and fight with each other about what the truth is. Scientists, these critics say, don’t know, and can’t agree on what their findings mean.

We ran across an example of that last week, with a report from David Burnham, a University of Kansas paleontologist. Dr Burnham and his colleagues have been studying the teeth of a dinosaur called Sinornithosaurus, and have found grooves in some of the upper teeth. Their study led them to the hypothesis that Sinornithosaurus was venomous, and the grooves were channels that delivered the poison, incapacitating the animals’ prey.

They have reasons other than the grooves alone for coming to that conclusion — other structures in the jaw, and comparisons with modern venomous animals could support their idea.

Of course, some scientists, also experts in the field, have come out in disagreement with Dr Burnham’s thesis:

The announcement of a new kind of dinosaur, especially one so radically endowed, usually brings out some skeptics. Paleontologist Tom Holtz of the University of Maryland says he’s not convinced yet. “They give a number of different physical features that they interpret as signs of poison or poison delivery systems,” says Holtz, who is an expert in carnivorous dinosaurs, “but which, in my opinion, are more easily interpreted in other types of biological contexts.”

And here we have the normal scientific debate, where challenges to the hypothesis are made, alternative explanations for the observed data are proffered, and the experts analyze and re-analyze what they have, looking for other items that support or refute one explanation or another.

For example, Holtz says many dinosaurs have a cavity in their jawbone, but it’s thought to have held an air sac for cooling. He says the grooves could be something else, maybe wear and tear. Holtz adds that he wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it turned out that Sinornithosaurus was venomous; he just doesn’t think the Burnham paper provides enough evidence yet.

Note that Dr Holtz does not say that Dr Burnham is wrong; it’s too early to determine that. He acknowledges that Dr Burnham could be right, but presses him with challenges that must be met first. Now that the preliminary data and hypothesis are out, there’s more study needed to see where it goes.

But Burnham says he has found more fossils in China with grooved teeth. And when he goes back to China, he says, he’ll be looking at dinosaur teeth a lot more closely than he used to.

That’s how science works. We argue with each other until we’re convinced that the explanations we have for the data we see are correct, to the best of the knowledge and information we have so far.

It’s what keeps science strong, honest, and real.

Not “Scott” nor “Scot”

I’ve seen the phrase “Scott-free” (or the lowercase version, “scott-free”) quite often recently, so I thought I’d comment on it, and offer something you probably don’t know.

That it’s not Scott, many of you do know — it has nothing to do with someone’s name.

But it’s not Scot either. That is, it also has nothing to do with Scotland nor its people.

The phrase scot-free, which means “without payment or penalty”, is the only remaining use of the obsolete word scot, meaning “tax”. It dates from the early 13th century, and entered Middle English from Old Norse. So, scot-free originally meant “tax-free”, and was generalized from there.

Now you don’t have to think you’re insulting the Scots when you use it. Gets you off scot-free, eh?

My favourite thing to do with spaghetti squash

I haven’t posted a “favourite thing to do with [food]” item in a long time. Here’s something I do with spaghetti squash that’s very tasty and cockle-warming.

Roasted spaghetti squash with chives, walnuts, and blue cheese

Cooking instructions for spaghetti squash often suggest sticking it in the oven whole, but I prefer to halve it lengthwise. It’s not easy to cut when it’s raw — you need a heavy knife (I use a cleaver) and a lot of oomph — but it’s worth the trouble to get some caramelization that adds a nice flavour.

So, preheat your oven to 400F. Cut a bit off the stem end of the squash first, so you aren’t trying to cut through the stem. Then cut the gourd in half from stem to tip. Remove the seeds and the membranes in the middle, and save the seeds for later. Spread a bit of olive oil on the cut surface and the inside, put it cut side down on a cookie sheet, and shove it in the oven for 45 minutes.

While you’re waiting, do four things:

1. Take some good fromage bleu out of the ’fridge, crumble ¼ cup or so, and leave the crumbled bits out to warm up.
2. Crush some walnuts coarsely... maybe ½ cup of crushed nut-meat, or a little less.
3. Coarsely chop or cut some fresh chives... about ¼ cup. They have to be fresh, not dried, or else don’t bother. If you like, use some other fresh herb. Tarragon would be very nice, or fresh marjoram.
4. Remove the seeds from the membranes, pat them dry-ish, and toss them with just a little olive oil — not too much.

When the squash is done, turn the halves over. The cut surface should be browned, and the pulp tender. Put them cut-side up somewhere and let them cool for a few minutes while you spread the seeds out on the cookie sheet, sprinkle them with salt and pepper, and put that back into the oven. While you continue below, keep an eye on the seeds. When they’re medium-brown, take them out; mind they don’t burn.

Go back to the squash, shred the pulp with a fork (going lengthwise through each half), and scoop it out into a casserole. Stir in the chopped chives, the crushed walnuts, the crumbled cheese, and a tablespoon or two of butter. More freshly ground pepper would be in order now, but be careful about adding salt — the cheese will be salty, so don’t overdo it. Mix it all up well.

Put the casserole into the oven and give it five or ten minutes there to make sure it’s nice and hot, then take it out. Don’t forget to turn the oven off. Note that you might skip this bit if you’ve messed with the pulp quickly enough that it’s still hot enough in the first place. You decide how hot you want it.

Serve it on nice plates or in shallow bowls, and garnish them with some of the seeds and a few extra stems of chives.

Bûche de Noël

Click to enlarge (but not large enough to eat).

Christmas-Carol Wordle

Here’s an appropriate wordle for Christmas eve. Click to enlarge. Joyeux Noël!

Grace periods and other allowances

I heard on the radio Monday that the New York City Council had just overridden Mayor Bloomberg’s veto on the proposed 5-minute grace period for parking enforcement. The mayor thinks it will be hard to enforce and confusing. The citizens and the City Council have this to say:

Residents have long groused about what they say are overzealous traffic agents who rigidly hand out tickets without any chance for a reprieve. Some believe that the tickets are part of a push by city officials to squeeze as much revenue from any and all sources, at a time when the city is staring at a multi-billion dollar deficit.

The traffic agents (New York City uses a civilian force to write parking tickets) may be overzealous, indeed, but a “grace period” will change nothing in that regard. If you think you have 45 minutes on the meter, and come back in 47 minutes to see an agent placing a ticket under your wiper... will it really be any different if you think you have 50 minutes and come back in 52 to the same scene?

Limits of any sort — deadlines, tolerances, room capacities, and such — are somewhat arbitrary, but if they’re to be enforced there must be a definition of the enforcement point. If we codify any sort of “grace”, then the inclusion of that grace defines the new limit, subject to the same complaints of zealotry as before. We may say that a room can hold up to 110 people, and stop the 111th from joining, and you may say, “But it’s only one more; surely that’s not going to hurt anything.” OK, so let’s suppose we don’t enforce it until there are more than 115 in the room. Well, now, 116 is only one more. Surely that will be OK as well.

We're only fooling ourselves to define a grace period, and it will actually turn out to benefit no one — not the city, and not the residents. Once people are used to it, they'll overstay their deadlines just as before, and they'll complain about the enforcement, just as before.

Apple service

Here’s a reason not to buy a Mac: Apple’s service, at least how I’ve just experienced it.

On Friday afternoon, I closed my MacBook Pro and went out to run errands. When I got home and opened the computer’s cover, I found that it had not gone to sleep, and that, while it was still running, the screen was dark. That is, as we say, not good. I connected an external display, and nothing appeared there either.

Since the computer was still running, I connected the backup drive and gave Time Machine the time to take another backup. Then I forced a power down. When I powered it back up, I got the “happy chord”, and the computer appeared to start (judging from the sound of the disk drive), but still no video, either on the laptop’s screen or on the external display. Sigh.

On Saturday I made a Monday appointment with the Genius desk at the local Apple store.

My experience at the Apple store was a good one; it was very busy, of course, given the time of year, and I got there early and waited. They thought they might get me in early, and that didn’t happen, but someone was available to see me just a few minutes after my appointment time. Nice. That isn’t the problem — and I’ll stress that the folks at the store were all great.

The technician ran a test or two, and decided, as I expected, that the computer needed to be sent back for a logic-board replacement. It would be $300 — not bad, I thought — but it would take seven to ten business days. I’ll have to be without a computer for two weeks. No loaners nor rentals available. And, they might wipe the hard drive, even though that has nothing to do with the problem. (I have a backup, as I said, but it’ll still be inconvenient to have to use it, and there’s always the danger of problems with the backup. Of course, most likely they’re just covering themselves, and that the disk will not actually be messed with. But see below.)

I appear to have no better option, so I went with it. They’ll ship it back to the store or directly back to me, but they’ll use FedEx for the latter, so, given the problems I’ve had with FedEx delivery, I had them send it back to the store.

With IBM (now Lenovo) systems, I had much better service, with two options:

1. They would express a refurbished replacement machine to me, without memory or hard drive. I would move the memory and hard drive from my broken machine into the replacement, put the old machine into the same box, and return it, using the pre-paid label they included. Perfect, and I’d get the box the day after I called, if I called in the morning. Almost no down time.
2. For less expense, I could remove the hard drive from my laptop and express it to them. They’d repair or replace it, at their option (in the latter case, with a refurbished machine), and express it back, with a turnaround of three to five business days — twice as fast as Apple is offering.

And in both cases, the hard drive never leaves my hands, so it can’t be damaged, erased... or copied.

When you depend on a computer, as I do, the difference is significant, and will certainly matter when I’m looking for my next laptop.

Ailing computer

Mon ordinateur est malade. Blog posting will resume after the Geniuses at the Apple store have revived it.

Clear!

Carnivals!

Sometimes, one gets too geeky for one’s own good. Whenever I read something about unionized workers, I momentarily think about workers who are not ionized. And, so, when I read this NPR headline on their we site:

Study: 15 Percent Of Teens With Cells Receive ‘Sexts’

...I thought, “What do they mean, ‘teens with cells’? All teens have cells. Everybody has cells. Our bodies are all made of millions of cells. Oh. Um. Right. Never mind.”

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #126.
• EduCarnival V2 #16.
• EduCarnival V2 #17.
• Math Teachers at Play #21.
• Carnival of the Godless #131, including “Skepticism and atheism”.

Unnecessary precision

We often see examples of insufficient precision, as when thirteen workers are killed in a building collapse, and a news report says that “more than a dozen workers died.” We can see that they’d want to hedge if there were still uncertainty about the number of deaths, but sometimes they just seem to think it sounds better this way. And if the number is high, it often makes more sense to report “more than six hundred” than to use the more precise “six hundred fourteen.” But when I hear “more than twenty,” I want to ask, “What does that mean? Twenty-one? Twenty-three?” If they’re uncertain, “at least twenty” makes that clearer.

On the other hand, there are times when there’s no value in more precision, and getting it just puzzles us. The Boston Globe’s excellent The Big Picture series has one of those in its 2009  in  photos set. The caption to photo 32 of part 3 says this:

A girl dives in a lake 100 km (62 miles) west of St. Petersburg, Russia, in this Aug. 7, 2009 photo.

Now, it’s unlikely that the lake is exactly 100 km from St Petersburg. It might actually be, say, 98 km away, or 103... or even 110. “100” is the sort of approximation we expect in a place such as this, a nice, round number that’s close enough for the purpose. So when someone punches that into a converter and gets 62.137 out in miles, we’d rather expect that to turn into “60 miles”. It would jar us to see the figure given to three decimal places, but it’s still kind of weird to see the the precision of “62”, given that the accuracy of the original “100” wasn’t good enough to warrant that. (And, conversely, seeing “62” might lead us to interpret “100” as being more accurate than it is.)

I saw a similar thing in an American airplane recently, where writing on an exit door said, “Caution: Door weighs 35.3 pounds.” That’s clearly a rounding of 16 kilograms (35.274 pounds) up to the next tenth of a pound, but why pick that particular precision? The point, here, is to warn someone who might have to manipulate the exit door about how heavy it is. “35 pounds” would be just fine for that — a quarter of a pound won’t make any difference, and if they think that matters then “36 pounds” would do as well. Is the door really 16 kg, and not, say, 15.8 or 16.3?

Think about what you’re stating (and converting), and use a precision that’s appropriate to the purpose. And if you’re worried about nitpickers, qualifiers such as “about” or “at least” are your friends.

 
While you’re looking through the 2009 in photos sets, I’ll point out two:
Part 1 photo 14 is very cool, and very hard to capture!
And part 3 photo 39 still makes me very happy.

Preparing for Christmas avec Acadie Man

As we approach the shortest daylight-period of the year, we, many of us, prepare to celebrate Midwinter, Yule, Winter Solstice, or... Christmas, a week from today — yes, even some of us who do not celebrate Christ do follow the secular festivities. We’ll enjoy indoor trees, lights and doo-dads, cookies, cakes, and “stocking stuffers”. We’ll listen to seasonal music (whether we want to or not), and we’ll read A Christmas Carol and A Child’s Christmas in Wales. In the northern part of the northern hemisphere, some will hope for a “white Christmas”. (What do my friends at the other end of the world hope for? A sunny beach day, perhaps?)

As you all make preparations, I think you need to take some advice from the very northern reaches of the northern hemisphere, from a strange part of the world once called Acadia, and now known as “The Maritimes”. Thence, in Acadie Man vs Noël, Acadie Man (the first Acadian superhero) gives us tips for how to survive the holidays — in a fractured, hilarious “Franglish”.

The accent is thick, and the switching back and forth between French and English can be a challenge, but give it a go. I probably only understand 30% or so of what he’s saying, but that’s enough to make it a real hoot.

Ceci n’est pas un Fruitcake

Abuse of representation

After talking, the other day, about the limits of representation, I feel I have to look at the other side: the junior U.S. Senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman.

It seems, indeed, that Senator Lieberman is on the other side, these days, no matter what side we’re talking about. So let’s start with a little history, which most of you will know. First, while he’s the “junior” Senator, he’s been in his seat for 21 years; he’s just junior to Senator Chris Dodd, who’s served eight years longer.

Joe Lieberman was a Democrat when, in 2000, Al Gore selected him as his running mate for the presidential election. We liked Joe then, we liberal Democrats, even while we had no illusions about his leanings. He’s always been more conservative than Senator Dodd, but he was on the right side as the Democrats were trying to beat George Bush and move the not-terribly-charismatic Vice President Gore into the White House.

But with George Bush in the White House instead, Senator Lieberman increasingly sided with the Republican President — most notably on the war issue, but also in other areas, such as most of the tax cuts (except on the very highest income levels). Lieberman’s stand on the Iraq war went against the interests of most of his constituents, and his popularity wavered.

In 2006, he was defeated in a primary election by Ned Lamont, a Connecticut businessman with an anti-war platform. Brushing that off, the Senator registered for the general election independently, promising that he was really a Democrat, and that apart from the war issue he would stand with the Democrats in the Senate. His seniority in the Senate, in addition to that promise, was appealing, and the voters of Connecticut backed him over Mr Lamont in the end.

Senator Lieberman did not keep that promise. More and more, he has been siding with the Republicans, blocking Democratic-supported legislation, forcing unfavourable capitulations and bill amendments, and, most recently, threatening to support a Republican filibuster against the health-insurance reform bill unless the bill is modified as he’d like it to be.

He doesn’t claim to be representing the people of Connecticut, but is following his own agenda in his own way. By overriding their own primary-election rebuke of him in 2006, they have, as Senator Lieberman sees it, given him free rein to go where he pleases.

And where he pleases is not pleasing, these days. If his demands are met — and it appears that they will be — we’ll have far weaker health-insurance reform that many of us would like, far weaker than many Democrats in the Senate have been working for. If we get a bill that does not have a public option, that’s partly due to Senator Lieberman. If the upper-middle-aged uninsured are not able to get coverage through Medicare, that’s due to Joe Lieberman as well, even though three months ago he said he supported that.

As Donna Magee, a protester from Baltimore, says in the NPR item, “I voted for him when he ran as vice president. And now he is completely turned the other way and is against all the things that we want.” Well, OK, it’s a little silly to say that you voted for him in 2000: you voted for Al Gore, and Joe Lieberman was along for the ride. And, too, you live in Maryland, not Connecticut, so you’re not one of his constituents. Fine. But Ms Magee’s statement is correct: Senator Lieberman has, over the last eight years, turned the other way, and is now, it seems, against all the things that we want.

And all the things that the majority of the people of Connecticut want, more to the point. He is not representing anyone. Perhaps the worst of it is that he’s taking advantage of his position as a “spoiler”, as the 60th Senator, who can swing over and support a filibuster, to force the 59 real Democrats to accede to his demands. That’s truly abusing his position and violating the trust the voters of Connecticut put in him in 2006.

And, alas, it won’t be until 2012 that they can vote him out. The Senate Democrats can, though, take away privileges, such as his chairmanship of the Homeland Security committee (a position they actually gave him after he left the Democratic fold). Harry Reid, it’s down to you; stop rolling over for Joe.

Why we have patents

The Congress shall have power to [...] promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

— United States Constitution, Article I, section 8

Yesterday, I commented about a specific patent that I don’t think should have been issued. I picked on it only because it’d just been brought to my attention; I think a very high proportion of the software patents that are out there should not have been issued. Most of them fail to meet the criteria for patents, specifically the requirements to be novel and non-obvious.

But I ended yesterday’s post with this statement: “That’s not what the patent system was meant for.” I want to take a longer look at that now.

At the top of this post is the paragraph from the U.S. Constitution that empowered Congress to create the patent system we have today. Look at what it says, because it tells us what the patent system was meant for: it was expressly meant to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”.

The patent system was not meant to protect companies’ investments, nor to create revenue streams, nor to support cross-licensing agreements — those are side effects of the implementation. It certainly was never meant to enable patent trolls, who patent things they never intend to realize or market, only to sue for patent infringement when someone else develops one of them into useful technology. That, too, is a side effect of the implementation, but is quite the antithesis of what the authors of the constitution had in mind.

When the Supreme Court made their 2007 decision — a unanimous decision from an ideologically divided court — they were going back to what the constitution intended: promoting progress. Allowing exclusive rights to minor, incremental changes in technology, as the patent system does now with computer software methods and systems, makes it extremely costly to push the limits of what we have, in order to develop something more grand.

Now, do you want to see some real innovation, something that’s not just a small increment, no ordinary innovation with predictable results? Try this recent TED talk by Pranav Mistry, from the MIT Media Lab, who developed a prototype system he calls Sixth Sense, which... well, go watch the TED talk. It starts off with some straightforward ideas, and gets more fascinating as it goes.

And if you watch it through to the end, when Mr Mistry answers a few questions, you’ll see that his approach is to make the programming available as an open source project.

That will promote the progress of science!

Dissecting a patent

Around two and a half years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously limited patents for the “predictable results” of “ordinary innovation.” At the time, my comment on that spoke full agreement:

I’m thrilled to see this decision. I’ve personally reviewed many computer software patents that I’ve considered to be obvious extensions or combinations of existing technology, and I’ve shaken my head and said, “Geez, who decided that this patent should be issued?” Maybe there’ll be less of that now, and maybe we’ll actually have to do some real innovation to get something patentable.

Alas, no. Two and a half years later, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is still issuing patents for the predictable results of ordinary innovation, obvious combinations of existing technology. The IBM Research blog has just highlighted a recent example. Of course, they’re presenting it as an example of an innovative patent by an IBM researcher... and I don’t mean to criticize the researcher, here: the system described in the patent is a useful one, the pressure to patent is high in large companies, and this is a well written patent.

It’s just not a particularly striking bit of innovation.

U.S. patent 7,610,187 has just one independent claim, a claim to the following method (paraphrased here):

1. A client requests content from a content feed (such as RSS or Atom).
2. The system identifies the client’s desired language (perhaps from a tag in the request, or perhaps it’s been pre-configured).
3. The system retrieves the content feed.
4. The system translates the content from its language into the desired language.
5. The system gives the translated feed to a feed aggregator.

From my point of view as a user of this, I would subscribe to a feed without regard to its language (perhaps I tell my feed reader to include a news feed from Le Monde). When I see the items in my feed reader, they’ll have already been translated into English for me. Machine-translated, of course, and I have to be aware of the limitations of that, but it’s still pretty useful.

Let’s look at what’s new here.

Machine translation, of course, has been around for a long time — decades, at some level, and on the web since pretty close to its beginning. Babel Fish was the earliest one on the web that I’m aware of; there are many more now.

Proxies that manipulate data have been around for a long time as well, also decades. Just looking at it from the point of view of web servers and services, we can find proxies that filter objectionable content, proxies that reformat content for different devices (make pictures smaller and rearrange layout to send to your mobile phone, for example), proxies that turn one data encoding into another, and so on. That’s not new.

In fact, here’s a patent by AT&T from 1999, U.S. patent 5,875,422, “Automatic language translation technique for use in a telecommunications network,” which does exactly this, in different words. It covers speech or text; communication by telephone, computer, or fax; addressing through telephone number or IP address; language preferences obtained in various ways; and so on.

What’s new in the IBM patent are the content feed and the feed aggregator (reader).

Is that significant innovation? Or is that “ordinary innovation”, showing “predicable results” of normal technology development? It’s clear to me that it’s the latter: it’s just a matter of where the data’s coming from and where it’s going after it’s translated. What’s stopped us from adopting this sort of thing before now is the quality and reliability of the translation, not the lack of innovation in putting the pieces together.

There are natural-language-translating web proxies available, which will basically behave as though you got the web pages and then told Google to translate them for you. Such a web proxy would now, if it were used to retrieve an RSS feed, be infringing on this patent. Of course, before this patent was issued, that same proxy infringed on the AT&T patent from 1999. And so it goes.

What this says is that the 2007 Supreme Court decision has had no effect on the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. The decision’s effect will be limited to court cases — if, for example, someone should challenge this new patent on the basis that it merely patented ordinary innovation — but these sorts of patents will continue to be issued, and their existence will continue to frighten away those with other, novel ideas, who are unwilling to risk being on the wrong side of a legal notice.

That’s not what the patent system was meant for.

The limits of representation

There’ve been a couple of setbacks to marriage equality in the northeast U.S. recently. Thursday’s planned vote in the New Jersey state Senate was postponed, and the New York state Senate’s vote a week earlier shot down our state’s proposal by a vote of 38 to 24. The New York state Senate comprises 32 democrats and 30 republicans; all republicans and eight democrats voted against the bill. This is the third time the state Assembly has sent such a bill to the Senate.

One of the eight democrats who helped vote it down is Joe Addabbo, a first-term senator who represents a conservative district in Queens. Much of Senator Addabbo’s district identifies as Catholic, a group that tends to disfavour the idea of same-sex marriage. Even so, GLBT groups campaigned hard for Senator Addabbo, hoping for an ally on gay rights issues, and his vote is widely viewed as a betrayal.

Local talk-show host Brian Lehrer had Senator Addabbo on his radio program two days later, giving the senator a chance to explain his vote. Here’s how he began, at about a minute and a half into the audio:

[...] but at no point did I ever say “yes”. I always promised all, both advocates of the bill, proponents, as well as opponents of the bill that I would keep an open mind. And up to the vote, nobody in the media, and very, very few of my elected-official colleagues, and very few of my constituents, if any, knew of my position.

The reason being, it was my intention to keep an open mind, and by doing so, I felt that I would get a clear indication of where my district stands on this issue. If I was to say that I was against the bill early on, then the only people I would hear from were those who were for it. Conversely, if I said I was for the bill, then the only people I would hear from were those who were... be against it.

Because, I didn’t indicate either way, I feel that of the over 400 emails, faxes, phone calls, conversations that I had with constituents, the 74% who said that they would not want their state senator to vote for this bill was a clear indication where my district was on this issue. And when I took my oath in January to become a state senator, it was to represent the people of the 15th senatorial district, and certainly when you have a clear consensus of the people of the district on a certain issue, that’s the way I think an elected official has to go.

Now, in a post in November I noted that senators, members of the state assembly, and the like “represent their wards, districts, and states in legislative bodies, and it’s they who are expected to fairly represent the needs of their constituents,” so I get what Senator Addabbo is saying, here. So, is he being straight (um...) with us, or is he being disingenuous? Are there limits to representation? Is there a point where the representative’s own moral and ethical sense should kick in and override what he thinks his constituents want? Or is he obliged always to vote as the collective mind of his public?

Brian Lehrer tries to tease that out with a question, but the senator goes nowhere with it:

Lehrer: But if 74% of your callers said to deport all the Hispanics in your district, would you vote for that?

Addabbo: I think it’s a different issue, it’s apples and oranges. Each issue is very different, and certainly, as an elected official, I am the voice of the people of my district, in Albany. And certainly, we take issue by issue.

Lehrer: This is the basis on which to base a vote on civil rights?

Addabbo: You know what?: This is an issue that people have a strong opinion on, and with marriage equality it’s like the spokes of a wheel, there are conversations that you can have on this issue on many levels. Whether it be on the civil rights issue, on the religious issue, on the morality issue. It’s different issues, and it’s different for everyone. And I understand the magnitude of the issue and I understand what it meant to a lot of people... many of those people who had supported me. But, like I said, it makes me be put in a very serious situation, when I have to represent a district, and be their voice in Albany.

But it’s not “apples and oranges”; this is a serious point. How far would the senator take his — admittedly laudable — calling to fairly and rigorously represent his district, even by going against his own views to do so? The senator (probably wisely) refuses to say.

But what’s alarming, here, is that he’s now brought religion into the political arena, as he talks about the spokes of a wheel. One spoke is civil rights, another is religion, another (is it really another, or mostly an aspect of the second?) is morality. As I look at it from the point of view of how our government should be run, I don’t see the religious aspect as being relevant.

We can bring it partially into relevance, though, by saying that he isn’t making his decision based on religion, but based on the opinions of his constituency, and it’s their opinions that are rooted in religion. Can we really question people’s motivations for their stands, and only give credence to those that don’t emanate from piety? Is that reasonable, or even possible?

But when Mr Lehrer pushes one more time for some clue about where the limits to strict representation lie, Senator Addabbo’s answer, still not committing to anything, but telling in its lack of commitment, brings his whole point crashing down:

Lehrer: Do you consider this a civil rights issue?

Addabbo: I can see that argument. I can see the religious argument. I can see the morality argument. Again, I can see the argument on many levels. This issue has that many levels to it.

Lehrer: Do you believe personally that gay marriage should be legal?

Addabbo: You know what?: I’ve always kept my feelings personal, because I am but one opinion. And it’s really an issue that I don’t have strong convictions on either way. That’s why I did keep an open mind, I felt I was most neutral up until the end.

It was that statement that first had me understand that what he’s really doing is hiding behind his constituents on what is, city-wide, an unpopular vote. And the longer he talked, the more clear that became. By doing that, he hopes to have it both ways: he voted his mind, and he can say, “But don’t blame me; I was only doing my constituents’ bidding. Isn’t that what I was elected to do?”

Even as a public representative, one has also been elected to lead. Sometimes one has to take a stand — for civil rights, for public health and safety, for the good of the environment, for the well being of society as a whole — that’s not in line with what the residents of one’s own district want. In any case, whether it is or it isn’t, one should own the decision, and not pass it off with, “It’s them! They made me do it!”

Protection and trust

Yesterday, The Ridger posted an item at The Greenbelt about some misleading marketing spin:

Several times in the last week I’ve seen an ad for Identity Guard, which is some form of protection against identity theft.

Their slogan: Identity Guard - making it OK to trust again.

No. They’re making it unnecessary to trust.

Indeed; it’s the difference between “No one will rip you off,” and “When someone rips you off, we’ll fix it.”

I thought I’d riff on that distinction for a moment, because it’s really where much of our security “protection” leads us.

There certainly is plenty of actual defense going on. When the presence of police deters a criminal, that’s what we’re really looking for. When using a secure (encrypted and verified) connection to a web site prevents a Bad Guy^TM from listening in, that’s what we want. We’re fending off problems. And the extended validation certificates, along with browser support that highlights them, can be said to “make it OK to trust” a web site (but see my discussion of that).

In contrast, things like TRUSTe for web sites and certified email systems, penalize violations. They don’t stop anyone from doing bad things in the first place, and, depending upon what one can get away with before being shut down, they may be providing insufficient protection. Indeed, something like TRUSTe can actually be dangerous, to the extent that it gives people a false sense of security.

That’s how it is with spam filters and anti-phishing filters on your email. They’re shielding you from having to deal with a lot of garbage, and that’s good. The phishing filters are protecting you from a good many messages that would fool you into giving away your passwords, and that, too, is good. But they’re often marketed as things that let you trust your email... and that’s bad.

If you consider that these things enable trust, you’ll be snagged by the stuff that gets past them. The web site that has a bogus TRUSTe logo, the email message that claims to be from your bank (but isn’t), and the bogus “e-holiday greeting” that’s ready to deliver some nasty software that will take over your computer are even more likely to catch you unawares when they’re rare.

Protection and trust are not the same thing.

In praise of kudos

That’s koo-dos, with an unvoiced “s”, not the voiced koo-doz, which sounds like a plural.

It’s not a plural, in fact. “Kudos” comes from Greek, a singular noun meaning “praise”. Just as we’d say “much praise”, not “many praise” (nor even “many praises”), we should say “much kudos”, not “many”. “The kudos she received for her work was [not were] well deserved.

In particular, never say “a kudo”; it makes no more sense than to take a couple called “Jones” and refer to one of them as “a Jone”. The cosmos doesn’t give us a “cosmo”. We can experience pathos, but there is no “patho”. Not everything ending in “s” is a plural.

Much kudos to those who get it right.

Support EFF

If you still have a job and you’re still donating to good causes, here’s this year’s recommendation: How about a donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)?

The EFF fights for online privacy rights, network neutrality and independence, reasonable intellectual property rights, fair use rights, and other stuff that we should all care about a great deal. They go over the top sometimes, for my taste, but we need people pushing the limits and paying lawyers to fight these battles.

Go support them, if you can.

Skepticism and atheism

The New York City Skeptics just had an event last weekend, SkepticampNYC. I didn’t attend, but I read the blog: on their blog, Gotham Skeptic, there’s a post this week that stems from a session at the event. The post is exploring whether one must be an atheist if one is a skeptic. A speaker at SkepticampNYC thought one did; the blogger disagrees.

A lot of the discussion about it involves defining "atheist" in some precise way, and distinguishing that clearly from "agnostic". I think that’s a red herring. I don’t care what you wants to call yourself; if you think you’re an atheist, you don’t have to fit my definition of it. And if you don’t believe in God, but prefer to apply “agnostic” to yourself (or “non-theist”, or “spiritual, but not religious”, or something else) that’s OK too. The point isn’t semantics.

The point, really, is whether belief in God is consistent with skepticism. I think it can be, but that it’s somewhat of a tough sell. If skepticism involves looking at evidence and making conclusions from the evidence, it’s certainly possible that one might analyze the evidence and decide that it points to God. There isn’t a defined “skeptic position” on things, and we don’t all have to agree.

But many people keep trying to pull it back to faith. There are frequent claims that atheists (or skeptics, or scientists, depending upon the context of the discussion) are “believers” too, but we just believe in different things. (Contrast that with the claims that atheists “believe in nothing,” whatever that might mean.) Many argue that atheism is as much a religion as any other.

Along that line, in a related discussion, someone made this comment:

Are you claiming that scientists don’t have faith?! I bet there are many things in the science text books that you believe, but have never seen direct evidence for yourself.

The writer, here, misunderstands — perhaps intentionally, as a rhetorical mechanism — the point of evidence. There’s far too much to know for us all to see everything for ourselves. Yes, we rely on others to record it for us. And what’s been recorded has detailed observations, measurements, and other clear data. It’s well documented by multiple observers. It’s reproducible, and it’s been reproduced. We can go check these things out for ourselves; it’s because it’s so well documented that we generally don’t have to.

There’s a vast difference between that and what some believe on faith. “I measured the effect of the moon’s gravity, and here are my methods and data for your inspection,” is a very different thing from, “I felt the hand of God protecting me,” or, “I saw Jesus in the sunlight of my window,” or, “God spoke to me and told me what I must do.” These may be very real to the people who are saying them, and they may serve to convince the ones who had the experiences. But they are not evidence that can be examined by anyone else, and they’ll get not a moment’s consideration from a skeptic.

But, say some, if atheism is not a religion, why are there atheists trying to convert people? Why don’t all atheists go off happily disbelieving, and leave the believers alone. Indeed, most of us do, most of the time. I’ve often said that I don’t make a point of insulting people for what they believe, and I’m mostly OK with consenting adults believing anything they like.

There are two problems.

One is in how this affects children. We find it acceptable, by way of encouraging their natural imagination, to let them believe in unicorns, ghosts, witches, and Santa Claus for a time, but as they begin to mature, we wean them from such fantasies and steer them toward learning about the real world. It’s still OK, of course, for an older child to like unicorns... as long as the child understands that it’s just imagination.

And, yet, as we pull them away from one fantasy, we lead them to another, teaching them that they’re being watched over, that they will be protected, that their prayers will be answered, if only they believe. It’s easy to look at all the devout believers who are not protected, and whose prayers are not answered to see how demonstrably false this is, but many children are taught it as truth, and go on believing it into adulthood. Can we really be thought to consent, as adults, to a belief system that was loaded into our programming when we were children?

The second problem comes in adulthood, in the way we set up our society. By encouraging belief in fantasy, we blur the line between pseudoscience and real science, as one fantasy leads to another. If we can take one thing without evidence, why not others as well?: astrology, dowsing, auras, homeopathy, fortune telling, and all manner of other nonsense — all of which are shown not to work when we put them down to real tests, when we try to look at the evidence.

Worse, we give people divine support for whatever they decide to believe in, and whatever they choose to do about it. People moved by religion will starve their children waiting for God to provide, drown their children to keep them away from Satan, kill and threaten to kill those who disagree with them. They will fly planes into buildings to kill non-believers, incite deadly riots over cartoons they find insulting, and limit the rights of others because they think they know what God wants.

“You can’t blame God for that!”, you say? No, I don’t; there’s no God to blame. What I blame is our acceptance of belief in fantasy. It’s more than acceptance, in fact: we consider it a great honour to have faith, a show of strength to maintain belief despite all evidence to the contrary. One result is that we don’t need to think for ourselves and reason out what makes sense. We know what God wants, we know that God will take care of us, we know what we need to do in God’s name and in His defense. Only, each one “knows” something different; each side of every war has God on its side. They can’t all be right.

To be sure, everything I linked two paragraphs above comes from extremists. Most of us can put a teaspoon or so of belief into our teacup, and live a mostly rational life with just a little fantasy to make us feel good from time to time. That isn’t what most atheists are on about. We’re concerned with the big picture. We truly worry about a society that puts value on living outside reality. We see the importance of understanding the real world. And we know that we must choose our leaders not on the basis of what God they believe in, or don’t, but on the basis of what actions they will take, and how they will lead.
 

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Update, 9 a.m.: And then, on the extreme side, there’s this guy. Oy.

On highway exit numbering

There are two ways to number exits on a limited access highway: they can be numbered sequentially, or they can be given numbers that correspond to nearby mile markers.^[1] Driving through New Jersey can expose one to both systems: the Garden State Parkway uses the mile-marker system, while the New Jersey Turnpike uses sequential numbers.

Each system has a primary advantage, and each represents a corresponding disadvantage to the other system. When sequential numbers are used, one knows how many exits one has to go, but one doesn’t know how far that is. With mile-related numbers, one knows how far it is to one’s exit, but one has no idea how many exits there are in between.

There’s a secondary disadvantage to the sequential system, which partially negates its primary advantage: if a new exit is added, what number is it given? Renumbering all the subsequent exits is very disruptive, since people rely on persistent exit numbering in printed directions. Such renumbering is sometimes done, posting both the old and new numbers for some years. The less disruptive solution is to append a letter to the number of a nearby exit, as was done for exits 7A (between exits 7 and 8) and 8A (between 8 and 9) on the New Jersey Turnpike. But now, if one is at exit 7 and plans to go to exit 11, one underestimates the number of exits in between by two.

That would seem to say that we should always use mile-marker numbers to number the exits. And, yet, it is useful, sometimes, to have an idea of how many exits one has yet to go.

So why not have a system that gives both? We could have exits represented with two numbers, say mmm-nnn, where mmm is the persistent mile number, which would generally be immutable,^[2] and nnn is a sequential number, which might change over time. People would know that exit 132-5 could become exit 132-6 at some point, if a new exit were built at mile 120 (becoming exit 120-5). But when directions said to go to exit 132-5, we’d generally know both how far and how many exits to go.

Good plan? Or too confusing, and something only an engineer could love?
 

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^[1] I suppose there could be a third option, giving them arbitrary numbers that relate to nothing in particular, but that’s a pretty silly alternative that I’ve never seen tried.

^[2] I say “generally” because it’s possible to do major rerouting of a road that might cause the mile markers to change significantly enough to prompt renumbering. That does happen, but it’s fairly uncommon.

Clumping, and throughput in public transportation

Several weeks ago, New Scientist ran a story about some mathematical modeling work that a couple of researchers in Mexico did. They modeled public transportation systems, and investigated the clumping effect that causes buses and trains that are supposed to be evenly spaced to wind up traveling in irregularly spaced clusters:

Public transport vehicles — underground trains, for example — set off from the start of their routes equally spaced. The problem starts when one is briefly delayed, making more time for passengers to accumulate at stations further down the track. Since passenger boarding is the main factor delaying trains, these extra people slow the train even more.

Meanwhile, the gap between the delayed train and the one behind is shortened. That means fewer passengers for the train behind to pick up, making it pass through stations faster until it catches the train ahead. Eventually, all the trains on a route can end up crawling after the slowest, lead train.

Not surprisingly, this clumping, or “platooning”, is bad for throughput: a second vehicle, or even a third, arrives so soon after the first that there are few passengers waiting for it. By the time the next cluster arrives, there’s a batch of people waiting for it, who had expected a train or a bus five or ten minutes earlier, or more. And adding more vehicles just makes the clusters larger.

There are ways to patch things up, by having the lead train skip some stations, for example, but the patches are poor responses to the situation. And just as it’s not surprising that the clumping is bad, it’s also not surprising that there’s an optimal way to stop the problem in its tracks (sorry). It’s a combination of

1. requiring vehicles to stay at each stop for a minimum time, even if there’s no one waiting to board (this prevents their catching up to the one ahead), and
2. having vehicles leave the stop after a maximum time, even if there are still people waiting to board (this stops the lead vehicle from being delayed, which is the primary cause of the clumping in the first place).

Of course, this solution is a usability nightmare. Passengers sitting on a train that’s stopped at a station, waiting, when there’s no one to wait for, will be upset that they’re not moving ahead. Passengers left behind by a bus that closes its doors in their faces will be even more upset, for obvious reasons. Complaints will abound.

But these are cultural issues. In Japan, I noted that the trains kept to a very strict schedule. They were on time, precisely. They waited for no one, and no one expected them to wait: signs, in Japanese and English, warned people to be ready, and announcements said that we’d be “making a brief stop”, emphasizing brief. If expectations are properly set and the passengers learn to be accustomed to the procedure, the system works. And, too, if the next train will be there soon enough, missing this one is tolerable — it’s much more of a problem when the next one isn’t due for an hour, but when that’s the case the schedules can be adjusted to allow for longer stops and catch-up periods (when the train waits an extra minute or two if it’s gotten ahead of schedule).

The key is avoiding the outrage when the train or the bus doesn’t wait for someone who’s running to catch it, or even someone who’s just about to step through the door, having waited in the normal flow of passengers. It’s hard to get people to understand that while you may have your trip delayed by ten minutes, the result is that we’re keeping things moving for better throughput for everyone. Or, turning it around: waiting for you would mean, ultimately, making hundreds of other people late.

It requires an adjustment from the “me first” approach that’s too common in our society.

Japan, part 4: the language

A glance at any Japanese text makes it clear that the script is fully alien to us, and a reading of some of the fractured translations makes it clear that the language works very differently. Consider, for example, the nonsensical t-shirt the child is wearing, in the photo to the right. Is it a poem, translated to English from Japanese? Is it something else? What does it mean? How did it get this way?:

Special girls park

Do you know

Special park

Your smile

make all 100%

happy

That was the only entirely nonsensical thing I saw while I was there, but there were some other interesting translations. A sign that said, “Our bus is carrying out piston operation from the Himeji station southern entrance to this hotel.” One admonishing, “Eating and drinking in this place should withhold.” Instructions for using an intercom that told you to “Release the red button when you hear.” Well, when you want to hear, or, as we would really say it, “Release the red button to listen.”

Japanese doesn’t use articles as English does, and in their translations they often seem to randomly sprinkle definite and indefinite articles, with little regard for usage. At one meal, I ordered something that was translated as “Duck, and the salad of a sweet potato,” expecting to get a main portion of duck, with some rendition of sweet-potato salad on the side. What I got was a salad of mixed greens, dressed with a vinaigrette and topped with a few slices of duck and some diced yellow sweet potato. Good, but not what I expected.

They also appear to use pronouns differently, resulting in some sentences that are entirely lacking in pronouns (the subject has already been established, so they’re not needed). In a description of a historical battle, one sign talked about the army this way: “In a dangerous storm, turned off a light and suppressed a voice and marched for a surprise attack.” It’s an odd sentence, and yet it’s entirely understandable.

Written Japanese uses four scripts — five, if you count the use of Arabic numerals (which is handy: whatever else we can’t read, the numbers, including times and prices, are readable to us). The most complex script is kanji, literally “han characters”. This is the script adopted from Chinese, and it is mostly readable by the Chinese (the characters are spoken differently, so the Chinese can’t understand spoken Japanese, but they can read what’s written). There are a great many ideographic characters, and there’s little hope of reading this without serious study.

There are two kanas, phonetic scripts: hiragana and katakana. It’s not clear to me when they use one as opposed to the other, but each of these has only about 50 phonetic characters, and these are easily learned (I haven’t yet, but I will before my next trip there), allowing one to sound out things that are spelled in the kanas.

I say they’re “phonetic”, but they’re not strictly alphabets: each kana symbol represents a syllable, and each Japanese syllable consists of a lone vowel, or a vowel preceded by one of nine consonants: K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, and W. So there are kana symbols for ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, and so on. There are a few variations: si turns into shi instead, for example, and ti becomes chi, tu becomes tsu, and hu becomes fu. There is a syllable-final n, which is said with some form of nasality, depending upon the subsequent syllable and the speaker’s accent.

Four of the consonants can be modified into related ones using diacritical marks: k can become g, s can become z, t can become d, and h can become b or p. Finally, if the -i version of a consonant is followed by ya, yu, or yo, the i sound is dropped and the result is a single syllable. For example, the katakana for “Tokyo” would be トキョ, which is not read as “to-ki-yo”, but as “to-kyo” (but Tokyo is normally written in kanji, as 東京).

The fourth script is romaji, Roman characters — transliteration into English characters. That’s mostly seen as initials and other abbreviations, things like “JAL”, “JR”, and “NHK”. It’s also used to make things readable to foreigners, and there’s enough of that in the transit system, street names, and the like to help one get by. The subway station I used, near my hotel in Tokyo, was 京橋, but it was also labelled Kyōbashi, so I didn’t have to figure out the kanji to know where I was (the station was also numbered, G10 (station 10 on the Ginza line), to make things even easier).

One thing that adds to the image of written Japanese as daunting is that words using these scripts can be intermixed in a single sentence... and Japanese doesn’t use spaces between words, so it all looks like one long string of scribbles. Look at the sign in the photo to the right, from the top of Mount Misen. You can see all five scripts on it — kanji, katakana, hiragana, romaji, and Arabic numerals. Click here for a detail of the middle right side of the sign, where one sentence contains four scripts, and I’ve annotated which is which.

Because all Japanese syllables end in vowel sounds (except for the syllable-final n), an adjustment has to be made when they adopt a word from another language, such as English. Such words are normally spelled in katakana, and vowel sounds are inserted to make them spellable — and pronouncable — in Japanese. Ice cream comes into Japanese as アイスクリーム, ai-su-ku-rii-mu (and definitely not as the Japanese words for “ice” and “cream”). Some of the loaners are amusing; what we call “french fries” are called フライドポテト, fu-rai-do-po-te-to.

Mostly because of the difficulty in reading Japanese words, I learned essentially no Japanese while I was there, which is disappointing. I arrived armed with three basic words: hai (はい, yes), arigato (ありがと, thank you), and kudasai (ください, please (in some situations)). Not knowing when to use the third properly, I didn’t use it. I sprinkled the other two liberally. And I didn’t really learn any more. That certainly made it clear how important it is to my learning to see a language written, and to be able to read it.

One final point, bridging language and culture: as I mentioned in the post about Japanese culture, the ability to write beautifully is considered an important skill, and many of the Japanese cultural treasures consist simply of handwritten text. Moreover, rulers were expected to possess this skill, and there are many examples of poetry hand-written by emperors of the past, letters written by the emperors’ wives, and so on. A poem should look beautiful on the page, in addition to being beautiful to hear.

The Japan album in my photos includes a number of examples from the Tokyo National Museum, including the one above left, which I like a lot, and which mixes pictorial art with calligraphy.

Carnivals!

Maybe you read, the other day, about a dog called Jesus (I guess because he liked the name) that started attacking people and had to be shot and killed. The authorities tried to capture the dog, and when that failed they tried a Taser, which also failed. The MSNBC article tells it this way:

Rockville Police and Neighborhood Services, meanwhile, made several attempts to capture Jesus using a capture pole. After hours of trying to capture him, police entered the home and used a taser gun to stun the dog, which did not phase the animal, according to police.

Of course, what we’re going to do here is pick at the language: the word they’re looking for is faze, not phase. As a verb, phase means to sequence or synchronize. To faze is, according to American Heritage, “To disrupt the composure of; disconcert.” As an Americanism it dates from the 1820s, and ultimately comes to us from Old English fesian, to drive away.

Unfortunately, the MSNBC editors are out of phase with this one. But I suspect it doesn’t faze them at all.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #125.
• Carnival of the Liberals #99.
• EduCarnival V2 #14.
• EduCarnival V2 #15.
• Carnival of Mathematics #60.
• Carnival of the Godless #130.

Japan, part 3: the food

Today, we get to what may be the most important part of any foreign trip: the food. A friend once asked why, when I talked about my travels, I always talked about the food. “Why do I care what you ate?” Well, that friend was clearly not a “foodie”.

And, of course, the food in Japan is mostly very different to what we generally get here, so it’s particularly worth making one of these pages less empty for.

Where to start? Well, perhaps with the local dishes. Hiroshima is known for an item called okonomiyaki, お好み焼き. Actually, okonomiyaki is served throughout southwestern Honshu, as well as in the rest of Japan, but Hiroshima lays claim to being the place that does it right. So we had to try it for lunch one day, much as one has to get a cheesesteak when one visits Philadelphia. Okonomiyaki (see the photo to the right; click to enlarge) starts with a thin pancake formed on a grill. When the pancake is turned, it’s piled up with stuff — here, cabbage, noodles, bean sprouts, and whatever meats and seafood you’ve ordered. The whole stack is then finished with a lightly beaten egg and turned over again, with a weight put on it to really get it cooking (that’s where you see it in the photo). To serve it, the guy turns it over again, plates it, and lays on some sweet/salty sauce. It was very tasty, and very filling.

For another local specialty, we go to Itsukushima (Miyajima), where they make little filled cakes called Momiji manju. Manju, 饅頭, are made throughout Japan, in various shapes and forms; the Momiji manju are specifically in the shape of maple leaves (Momiji, 紅葉), and they come with all kinds of fillings. The red bean paste filling in the photo to the left is the most common. Other fillings include custard, cheese custard, green tea, chocolate, and various fruit jams. When I first saw them, I expected them to be hard cookies. They not; they’re soft cakes, with a generous filling. You can buy them individually wrapped for less than a dollar apiece, and they’re very good!

Also on Itsukushima were a number of shops selling grilled fish-cake snacks on skewers (photo to the right; I don’t know the Japanese name for them). The wide variety was quite intriguing, and it’s too bad we’d just eaten lunch before we saw the snacks, or we would surely have tried some of them. Octopus and spring onion; cuttlefish foot; asparagus and bacon; burdock... they sounded very interesting! I’ll certainly try some if/when I’m there again.

Eel is very popular in Japan, and I’ve had it here in the U.S. in Japanese restaurants. There are two varieties: anago, 穴子, saltwater eel, and unagi, うなぎ, freshwater eel. It’s served as pieces of sushi, layered over rice in a bowl as a donburi dish, and, as seen to the left, wrapped with rice in nice little packages as onigiri, 御握り (these are made with unagi, which are grilled with a light spreading of barbecue sauce). Think of onigiri as a Japanese hamburger. (And in Tokyo, I had an unagi pizza.)

And while we’re on donburi, 丼ぶり, we should talk about katsudon, カツ丼, breaded pork cutlet served with onions and egg over rice. In Japan, the egg is left a little runny, and serves as a sauce for the dish. Katsudon is another very earthy, filling dish, a good stick-to-your-ribs lunch on a chilly day.

The Japanese do like eggs, and seem to serve them as part of many meals. I’ve already talked about the okonomiyaki and the katsudon, which both have egg in them. Perhaps you’re familiar with tamago, the tightly rolled omelet often served as part of a sushi meal. Breakfast omelets are different, done more like French omelets and very much in the French baveuse style, still runny in the middle. One popular egg concoction, omuraisu, オムライス, is widely served — it’s an omelet filled with fried rice (and the word is an example of adapting western words (“omelet” and “rice”, here), which I’ll talk more about when I talk about the language). The original omuraisu (right, a plastic model from a shop window) involves fried rice with chicken and ketchup, but there are many other variations, and I saw restaurants that specialize in them. I plan to devise my own favourite variation to make at home.

The most “different” meal I had was when a few of us went to a Japanese buffet restaurant. Except for the rice, noodles, and vegetable tempura (which was served at room temperature), we didn’t know what anything was — all the labels were in Japanese, and most things didn’t look familiar. We tried most of what was there, and were delighted with the surprises, even if each of us liked some things more than others. The tastes and the textures were sometimes unexpected. The only problem is that we still don’t know what we ate, so we couldn’t ask for it elsewhere.

Of course, tea, 茶, is ubiquitous. We were usually offered the choice of black tea or “Japanese tea” (green tea). Sometimes there were more choices, of specific varieties. Alexey and I went into a cafe in Himeji and had some tea flowers, those bundles of tea leaves that blossom in the hot water. And that seems a good photo to leave you with, there to the left.

It was a good food trip.

Japan, part 2: the culture

No discussion of a trip to Japan could be complete with some comments on Japanese culture, and how it appears to an American. When I made my first comments about the trip, on arrival in Hiroshima, I said this:

My first real exposure to Japanese culture was something I hadn’t been told about and wasn’t expecting: when train personnel left one Shinkansen car at the front, to go to the next one, they opened the door, turned to face the passengers, and bowed, before turning again and going through the door. The conductors did this, and so did the young women pushing the food carts. Every time.

When my colleague and I checked into our hotel rooms in Himeji, we had a similar experience. After getting our room keys, we made for the wrong elevator — the end where our rooms were uses a different elevator. A woman on the hotel staff, who was sitting near the elevator we went to, asked to check our room keys, and saw that we needed to use the one at the other end of the hall. In the U.S., she would probably have just pointed and said we needed to use the elevator down there, but this wasn’t the U.S. She led us down the hall, running ahead of us. When we got to the other elevator, she motioned with her arm as if holding the doors open for us. And when we got in and pressed the button for our floor, we saw that she was bowing to us, and she held the bow until the doors closed.

A few things occur to me about the custom of bowing. In these cases, it’s clearly stating that the people involved — the train crew, the hotel staff — are in positions of service, and are putting us above themselves in the social hierarchy, at least for the moment, at least while they’re serving us. No response is expected, and, indeed, it would be odd for the train passengers to try to bow back to the crew.

We do have some sense of not turning our backs on people: when we leave the house of a friend, we don’t usually just walk out and go — we turn back to face them again, and we wave. But our process of acknowledging someone in the way the Japanese do isn’t formalized as it is there, and it’s certainly very common for someone who’s serving us to simply turn away without a word or gesture, and walk away.

We also shake hands, of course, and that’s also very different. For one thing, it’s approximately symmetric: you offer your hand, I accept it, and we shake hands as peers, whether or not we are. There’s little difference in form between shaking hands with me and doing so with the President of the United States.

The bow, though, is very much asymmetric. First, and most obviously, it is simply given, and does not require any acceptance from the recipient. The depth and length of the bow can be adjusted, varying the statement that it makes. It’s a much more interesting and flexible social custom than the handshake.

There’s some perception that Japanese society is more relaxed, but that’s clearly not true in general. There’s a great deal of pressure to produce, succeed, move ahead; office workers often work long hours, still seen coming out of their office buildings at 8 or 9 at night. And you can always see people running on the streets of Tokyo, crisp-suited men and smart-skirted women running to catch a bus or a train, running to cross the street, or just running to get to where they need to be.

But what does seem to be true is that the Japanese place a great deal of importance on down-time, craving quiet and simplicity. Places to relax are austere, to western senses, with very simple furnishings and calming decor. A park or a garden will have a simple bench in a clearing, but it will be in a place where you can sit and hear water quietly running, or leaves rustling very gently.

The complete opposite of that is the tolerance for crowds. When I visited the Tokyo National Museum, the Heiseikan building, which houses special exhibits, had two exhibits of Japanese cultural treasures. Some of these were things used in the emperors’ houses, and much of the rest were scrolls and panels of writing — the writing of the adopted Chinese script is an art in itself, and the ability to make words look beautiful on the page is a renowned one.

The special exhibitions were very popular, and I arrived soon after the museum opened, at a very busy time. The special-exhibit halls were extremely crowded, and what really surprised me was that as I entered the first hall, I encountered a thick crowd, five to six people deep, packed against the glass. There was no hope to see anything without pressing into the crowd and being moved along with it. It seemed more like a Black Friday “door buster” sale than a scene at a cultural museum. I don’t know what was going on in people’s minds, but no one seemed to think this was at all unusual. As for me, I was very happy to finish the special exhibits and move on to the much more serene Honkan building.

Their smoking policy is interestingly reversed from ours: there are areas of the cities where they do not allow smoking on the sidewalks (though note on the sign that the fine is only about $10 for smoking, littering, or failing to pick up after your dog^[1]; the fine for doing graffiti is up to $500). But most restaurants do allow smoking, and it’s hard to find non-smoking restaurants, or even ones with effective non-smoking sections. So, in many places, one can smoke in the restaurant, but one has to put out one’s cigarette before going outside.

Speaking of the sidewalks: they are blind-friendly. The photo to the right (click to enlarge) shows a sidewalk in Himeji — Hiroshima and Tokyo both had these as well. The yellow strip has texture that can be felt under foot, and the ovals tell the direction the sidewalk goes. When the texture changes to small circles, it designates an intersection or turning point. I suspect there’s a national law that mandates this. It seems useful.

The syllable for "four" sounds like the syllable for "death", and so the number four is associated with death and is considered unlucky. Things don’t come in boxes of four, for example, and buildings do have 13th floors... but skip the fourth floor, as you can see in the photo to the left, of the elevator panel in my Tokyo hotel.

This is one case, at least, where we have it better than the Japanese: “triskaidekaphobia” is just such a cool word.
 

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^[1] And, by the way, I saw very few dogs, in particular contrast to New York City.