Exciting New Words

Some fun new terms I'm learning:

Pied-piping

Pied-piping is the name for the linguistic process of bringing a preposition along with a moved wh-word. Presumably the wh-word is the piper and the preposition is the rat or child.

1. With what shall we celebrate Pied-Piping Day?

2. On which day shall we celebrate pied-piping?

The opposite of pied-piping is preposition-stranding, where the preposition is left (stranded) in its original position.

3. What shall we celebrate preposition stranding with?

4. Which day shall we celebrate preposition stranding on?

Cognitively intact

It seems many drivers older than 70 (ahem) have accidents, and mostly because they are cognitively impaired (dementia, Alzheimers...). Alberta has apparently a test to see if older drivers are cognitively impaired, in which case, they don't get a licence (presumably). Those who pass the test are considered cognitively intact. Which is what I hope I am.

Vocal fry

I don't know why I've never heard of this before. It's the lowest vocal register, also called creaky voice and is apparently negatively perceived especially when used by young women. Sometimes goes together with uptalk to produce speech that annoys some older people (see Cognitively intact, above).

Amazeballs

The Oxford Dictionary, no less, has taught me to use this as an adjective...

Ojiplático

Muy sorprendido. "¿Cómo han reaccionado cuando les has dicho que te ibas?" "Pues, se han quedado ojipláticos." (con ojos como platos...)

I also learned recently that when you split an infinitive, what you're really doing is putting a preverbal modifier immediately before the verb in a to-infinitival complement clause

Open Letter to Telus

Dear Telus,

Thank you for your recent correspondence written in Punjabi.

Like many Canadians, I do not speak or understand Punjabi. Nor can I decipher the beautiful Gurmukhi script you used. I am therefore not sure why you were writing to me, though I can guess that it might involve a desire to woo me back, after multiple problems with your service caused me to move to another provider some years ago.

I do find it intriguing, though, and a little unsettling, to imagine what prompted you to write to me in Punjabi.

I know companies like yours use complex algorithms to determine the interests, weaknesses and other characteristics of their customers, based often on information they purchase from on-line entities such as Google and Facebook. Perhaps you know from those sources that I am a fan of Satyajit Ray, the incomparable Bengali film director, and of Arundhati Roy, author of the astonishing God of Small Things. Neither are Punjabi, of course, but they are from Northern India, and perhaps you consider that to be enough. Identity by association.

If I were a little more paranoid, I might think that you also have knowledge of my cohabitation during my Winnipeg years with a Gujarati-speaking architecture student. (The script for Gujarati, used for example in Ghandi's autobiography, might be seen as superficially similar to the Gurmukhi script in which Punjabi is normally written.) Going back even further, maybe you dug up information about my paper on Firth's 1956 book on Urdu in the popular British Teach Yourself series (previously published as Teach Yourself Hindustani).

A tad less worrisome, and possibly more likely, would be your awareness of my dining at local Indian restaurants, where I am exposed to TV channels in languages you could not imagine I do not understand, and which could be Punjabi for all I know.

Whatever your reasons for supposing I might respond favourably to wheedling in Punjabi, let me assure you that, like previous correspondence in English, your letter will fall on deaf ears, so to speak. No amount of linguistic ingenuity could convince me to abandon the quite satisfactory service I currently enjoy for promised improvements in which, based on past experience, I would be unwise to have any faith.

Costco

So we finally joined Costco. It seems strange having to pay to be able to shop, and show your card all the time, feeling vaguely guilty; but the quality of the merchandise is really on another level, compared to all the other places we grocery shop. Produce is excellent, fresh fish too, when they have it, and bread, and cookies and chocolates, and my wife likes the clothes. Their green beans are to die for.

If you're careful, too, you don't have to buy huge quantities of everything. I balk at the ten kilos of carrots, or big boxes of mangoes. But there's lots of other stuff, single pieces of cheese, five kilos of onions, just four pork tenderloins in a pack. Though sometimes they do go overboard. Today they sent me an email with some special offers for Christmas.



That is $1,699, for a basket of chocolates. Of course, it does come with one colour custom ribbon, with colour spelled properly for Canadians, but still. How can this offer sit in the same mailbox as messages pleading for $1 to help starving children? Do emails have no conscience, no soul?

Climate Change

I was worried recently when I discovered that human activity is only responsible for a small percentage of the CO2 produced on our planet. 

It seems we produce around 29 gigatons every year, whereas natural processes produce around 750 gigatons. How can you say we are the main reason for global warming, I thought, if we contribute so little CO2 to the total amount produced.

Fortunately, I accidentally hit on an explanation, on the Skeptical Science website, which seems to me quite reasonable. It's easy to understand when you look at the following chart published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

Global carbon cycle. Numbers represent flux of carbon dioxide in gigatons (Source: Figure 7.3, IPCC AR4).

So what happens is that vegetation and land produce 439 gigatons, but also absorb a bit more than that amount, whereas the ocean produces 332 gigatons but absorbs a bit more too. This relative balance between production and absorption has been relatively stable for millions of years.

But of course, adding 29 gigagtons without a corresponding absorption, puts the whole thing out of kilter, so CO2 levels in the atmosphere are now increasing every year. (The natural cycle does absorb around 40% of what we send up, but this is not enough to prevent a steady increase.)

We are now at 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, whereas pre-industrial levels were fairly constant at around 280 ppm. Such a change has happened in the last century or so, whereas naturally it would take millions of years.

Also just read a great post by Andy Skuce debunking climate change deniers' claims.

Reading vs Searching a Digitized Text

Interesting take on the digitization of texts in a recent article by Ryan Szpiech. A few extracts:

"David A. Bell in his article “The Bookless Future” began to muse about the “dangers” of text searching:

Reading in this strategic, targeted manner can feel empowering. Instead of surrendering to the organizing logic of the book you are reading, you can approach it with your own questions and glean precisely what you want from it. You are the master, not some dead author. And this is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master. Information is not knowledge, searching is not reading; and surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns.

[...] To view the text according to parameters defined by precise and limiting search terms is not simply to see only a fraction of the whole. (When, in fact, have we ever seen anything but a fraction of the whole?) Rather, as all text is transformed into data, the categories by which meaning is sifted and interpreted become narrower and more rigid. This changes the experience of the reader by limiting a priori the possible results, turning all books into reference books. The effects produced by this divide between reading and searching are impoverishing. David Levy already lamented in 2001, “We are now so oriented toward information-seeking and use that we have increasingly become blind to other, equally important dimensions of reading.” [...]

The reductive reading of a digital world, one in which text has become mechanically searchable, is a reading mediated principally through data. In an obvious way, this encourages a superficial engagement with writing and its significance, one directed at primary meaning rather than secondary or implied meaning, and one guided necessarily by selectiveness rather than completeness and by preconceived logical categories rather than creative intuitions developed at the moment of reading. The ossification of the categories of textual meaning necessarily eliminates the free and creative association characteristic of human thought, and yet it is such association that for me yields the intellectual benefits and the aesthetic pleasure of reading. Technology can produce larger and more elaborate data sets, but it cannot mimic the tangled and unexpected byways of insight and intuition. [...]

Just as Google Books does not simply strive to augment the reading of a book but to actually replace the reader’s book with the searcher’s book, so the ultimate goal of digital editions and digital facsimiles, I believe, is not only to reflect the “original,” to “capture” or “recapture” it, but to effectively replace it with a better image of itself. Whereas philology, the study of language history through texts, creates (like fetishism) a “desire for presence,” digital philology creates a simulacrum or iconic replacement for this presence. The injunction from Kings against graven images rings in my ears, and I choose a fetishism of the frail human object over an idolatry of the power of the machine."

Triangle Man

Last night, I went to the Jack Singer Concert Hall to hear Jan Lisiecki, the Calgary-born nineteen year old international pianist sensation, play the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra.

It was a very good concert. The Calgary Philharmonic has improved tremendously over the years, and Lisiecki is a very good pianist. Maybe not as fantastic as some claim, but very talented, with brilliant technique and an impressive shock of blond hair that moves around entertainingly as he plays.

The best part of the concert for me though was the orchestra's rendering of the Dvorak New World Symphony, which I thought was outstanding. I was sitting in the left mezzanine, which is basically right next to the orchestra, and you could hear and see the different sections, strings, woodwind, brass, percussion, as they played their parts, echoing each other in various ways, each with its own voice and of course timbre. This interplay, which seemed clearer here than on recordings, was beautifully done and I thought the whole piece was exquisitely played.

The musician closest to me was in the percussion section. At the beginning of the Dvorak symphony, not having any notes to play yet, he sat on a chair and rested his right arm on a stool next to him. Probably in his sixties, balding and rotund, he was dressed like the other men, in tails and a white bow tie, but his shirt was pushed out in front by his belly, and he wore the same expression of resigned boredom as the ex-alderman for Ward 1, where we live, Dale Hodges, the sourpuss of the Calgary City Council. I imagined he might also be a little jealous of the timpani player, a younger man, balding too, but less so, who had many more notes to play on the four big beautiful copper timpani which lay directly in the gaze of his older colleague. The older colleague himself had just two cymbals and a little snare drum, as well as a music stand with what looked like a single sheet of music.

I watched this older percussionist from time to time during the Dvorak, a little surprised he had nothing at all to do. He scratched his ear occasionally, and rubbed his nose, but otherwise, he just sat there, staring ahead at his colleague, who was leaping around, banging his timpani with white pompom drumsticks and all the enthusiasm of youth. During the second movement of the symphony, the older man stood up, and I thought he was going to participate, but it was just to move from the chair to the stool, which he now sat on with the same resigned look as before.

It was not until the third movement that he moved forward and picked up a small metal triangle which had been hidden from me by the cymbals. I thought he was going to play it, but he sat down on the stool again, resting the triangle against his tummy. Then he got up again, at the end of the third movement, moved forward close to the snare drum and picked up a little metal rod which apparently went with the triangle. He held the triangle up in his left hand now, and the rod in his right. I was on the edge of my seat. Then, as the final movement started, he moved the triangle away from himself, and his belly, inserted the rod inside, and rattled it furiously for a few seconds. Then he sat down again.

Four times during the exciting last movement he got up and played the triangle, not furiously like the first time, but in what seemed a gentle, almost foppish sort of way, just tapping it lightly three or four times in a row, then standing back. You could hardly hear it above the trombones and French horns, not to mention the timpani, all of which were going at full throttle. I don't remember ever hearing the triangle in recordings I've listened to, except perhaps during that intense beginning of the last movement. Now that I know, I'll listen for it.

Now my percussionist set the triangle down and, lordy me! picked up the cymbals. We were still only half way through the last movement, and I was sure he was getting ready to contribute to some splendid crescendo. But no. Holding the left cymbal facing upwards and resting about a quarter of the right cymbal on top of it, he simply moved the right cymbal down and off, once, making a gentle swooshing sound and that was it. He waited a few seconds after this contribution, then carefully set the cymbals back in their stand and went to sit down again. Where he stayed until the end. No more triangle, no more cymbals, no snare drum at all. He didn't contribute anything to the amazing finale; he just sat there, looking serious.

I noticed though, as we were all applauding to congratulate the orchestra on its wonderful performance, that, unlike the other musicians, he clapped too, as if he felt at a certain remove, knew that the others had done more than he, and supposed, grudgingly perhaps, that he should publicly thank them for it.