Random Musings: August 2003 Archives
How many outsiders are aware of the giant statue of Lenin standing in Seattle's Fremont Square? As the author of this 2001 article notes:
Imagine a statue in Westlake Plaza of Hitler, who stoked ethnic and class hatred to inspire extermination of six million Jews. Unthinkable. Yet, under the insidious, value-neutral rubric of "provocative art," Seattle proudly displays a larger-than-life sculpture of a man equally abhorrent. ...Dirty commies.Respected historians agree Lenin laid the ideological groundwork for 50 million to 100 million murders in the name of 20th-century Communism. Still, some local media observers have suggested our Lenin is cloaked in "ambiguity" and the statue deserves a pass because he inspired solidarity among our Wobblies in their heyday, or because a democracy-promoting fragment of the Berlin Wall has been considered for installation nearby.
Candace says (among other things) that this is the biggest Lenin statue left in the world, and if that's the case maybe it's in the right place.
Update:
Some people have asked for my "Just Say No to Commies" image that pops up occasionally, and here it is.
Update 2:
But what do I really think about communists?
Well, not today, but on this day 92 years ago. What brilliant plan did the lone thief come up with? He simply walked in and carried it out under his clothes.
I've (barely) seen the Mona Lisa myself, and I can assure you that it's much more securely guarded now. As secure as anything in France can be, anyway.
Here's a good French joke:
Why did the French plant trees along the streets of Paris?
So the Germans can march in the shade.
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is severely under-blogged. Yes, the show is absurd and emasculating, but come on... a) it's hilarious, b) sign me up. Carson can rework my couture, and Thom can eviscerate my house and start from scratch.
I have a Bible study at my house every Monday night, and after we're done we watch the previous week's episode of Queer Eye. Last night I learned that I need more color: more color in my pants, and more color in my house. I also learned to apply pomade from the back of my head to the front, and not front to back as I had been doing. Plus, Ted taught us how to make creme brule, which is one of my favorite desserts.
I did pretty well at the blackjack table in Vegas this weekend, so I thought I'd share the basic blackjack strategy I used to win. It's not uncommon knowledge, or particularly difficult, but it will reduce the house advantage to less than 1%. Here's a picture of the plastic card it's found on:
Blackjack is the only game I do well at, and it's the only table game that's close to even -- but only if you play it right. I saw people buying insurance and holding 16s all night long, and losing money left and right. Ultimately, it's all in the luck of the draw, but you have to do your part to maximize your chances and reduce the house's edge.
I'd just like to point out that SARS hasn't wiped out the human race... yet. Even SARS Watch seems to have lost interest.
Hopefully the chicken littles of the world will take note.
Google points out that it's Alfred Hitchcock's birthday!
And wow, did you know that Google is a calculator? It can even do unit conversions.
(Calculator pointed out by GeekPress.)
Today is possibly the first day in my entire life that I am the only member of my family in California. It's kinda lonely. I've spent months away from Los Angeles, but now it feels like home itself has packed up and gone on vacation.
President Bush is spending the month of August based out of Crawford, Texas, on what his aides call a "working vacation". This isn't really news, since he's vacationed at his ranch for years, but it always makes me smile. You see, the White House press corps hates Crawford.
The press corps that followed Bush to Crawford, 60 strong, holed up in an uncomfortably muggy gym while pressing Administration officials for information on the President's activities. Temperatures soar frequently to over 100 degrees in "broiling parched Crawford, Texas.""The press corps likes a cool ocean breeze and maybe even a cold beer," said Shields. "Presidents Reagan, Kennedy, and Clinton all vacationed near the sea, and thus spared themselves a churlish press corps."
Even the President himself acknowledged that his choice of vacation destination was not the press's. "I know a lot of you wish you were in the East Coast, lounging on the beaches, sucking in the salt air," he said to a group of reporters in Crawford. "The national media will hate it," Bush told Republican Senators, "but I'm going where it's 98 degrees average temperature, day and night."
I have a lot of friends who are native Spanish speakers, and when I listen to them talk together the sheer quantity of sound amazes me. I speak a little Spanish myself, but I can't speak or comprehend as quickly as my friends can; it can take me a considerable amount of time just to formulate and enunciate proper sentences. One of the aspects of Spanish that frustrates me is its sheer inefficiency. For example, consider the following common sentences (which I'll translate with Babelfish because I'm not that confident of my Spanish):
¿Dónde está el baño? (7 syllables)As you can imagine, if a giant monkey actually were standing behind you, you'd want to know as soon as possible. Those extra 8 syllables could mean the difference between life and muerte. Spanish can save syllables relative to English in some situations -- some verb conjugations do not require explicit subjects that are necessary in English, for example -- but most of the time it takes longer to say the same thing.
Where is the bathroom? (5 syllables)¿Tiene usted hambre? (7 syllables)
Are you hungry? (4 syllables)Sus zapatos se arden. (7 syllables)
Your shoes are on fire. (6 syllables)Un mono gigante está estando parado detrás de usted. (19 syllables)
A giant monkey is standing behind you. (11 syllables)
The problem is, English is hardly ideal either. Many of our most common concepts take two syllables to express (such as "maybe" and "I am"). But why think small? Sure, we can create contractions and short-cuts ("I am" goes to "I'm"), but we're still being inefficient -- let's make a whole new language built on phonemes rather than entire syllables!
There are 24 consonent phonemes and 14 vowel phonemes (in English, not all sources agree), giving us a total of 38 unique sounds to work with. (Need a review of phonemes?) An efficient language could assign the 38 most common concepts to these phonemes, and the 1444 next-most-common concepts to phoneme pairs. Not every pair or every sequence would be pronouncable, but most of them would be, with practice. What takes an entire sentence to express in modern English could be related with a single word in my new phoneme language!
The question then would be whether or not the human brain can generate or comprehend a faster, more efficient spoken language. Frankly, I doubt that it can. Even though our brains are highly specialized natural language machines, translating audio waves into mental concepts is incredibly difficult, and possibly the most complex operation our brains perform. The only other function that comes close to it in sheer processing power is our vision system.
See what kinds of nonsense I come up with when I go on vacation?
