Parvae Res Paucis Verbis Narratae

Does a man still drown in a tank under the stage if no one is there to see it?

Thu, 08 May 2008 02:51:39 GMT

Recently, I discovered the book version of The Prestige in a bookstore, and then of course had to rent the move to see how well it had been adapted. My father then recommended The Illusionist, and I saw that as well. This is thus a post about stage magician stories. Spoilers abound.

The Prestige, book and movie

The Prestige is about two rival magicians named Alfred Borden and Rupert (in the move version, Robert) Angier living in the 19th century. Borden has this amazing act wherein he enters a box and appears to magically translocate across the stage and appear in a different box at precisely the same moment. Angier is obsessed with finding out the secret of how it works and reproducing it, and finally gets Nicola Tesla to build him a device that will actually do real translocation (this is the part that makes it science fiction). Borden's secret turns out to be that he is in fact two identical twins, Albert Borden and Fredrick Borden, who have been living their entire lives pretending to be one man in order to preserve the secret of this magic trick.

That is pretty much all the book has in common with the movie. The origin of the feud is different; in the book, Borden becomes enraged at the idea that this Angier (who he didn't know at the time) is duping innocent people by performing seances, attacks him during a seance, and winds up hurting Angier's assistant/wife, who later has a miscarriage. In the movie, he ties a knot in an unexpected way in preparation for a trick, and Angier's wife drowns. The movie continues to be much more bloody-minded than the book. Angier's device actually produces an exact copy of Angier (rather than simply transporting him) who then has to be killed. Angier fakes his own death in both media, but in the movie one of the Borden twins is convicted of it and hung. Borden's own wife commits suicide when she discovers that her husband is in fact two men, and the remaining twin shoots Angier at the end of the movie. In contrast, in the book both men live long, more-or-less happy lives, have multiple children, and nearly all the characters die of natural causes.

The most interesting difference, however, is the nature of Angier's Tesla machine. In the book, when a living thing is put into it, it is transported to a specific location, but an empty shell of its body remains in the same place. Angier refers to this shell as the "prestige" materials. In the movie, of course "prestige materials refers to the duplicate Angier who remains in the machine, and is a real, live, thinking and breathing human being, who is plunged into a locked tank of water under the stage to drown during the performance, so that Angier seems to disappear, and the double does not cause problems. Alfred Borden gets under the stage one night to find out how the trick is done, and finds the prestige drowning in the tank, which is when he is framed for Angier's murder. In the book, what happens is that Borden accidentally interrupts the machine mid-transfer, and as a result it only transports part of Angier, separating him into a more-or-less physically complete version who is much lighter and has much poorer health, and physically wraith-like version who can pass through solid objects but is otherwise healthy. The movie version is more gruesome, but I think the book version makes better science fiction.

What makes this interesting is the morality of it. In the book, no one is murdered. The closest anyone comes to first-degree murder is when wraith-Angier, who is angry at Borden for messing up the trick in such a way, attempts to murder him, but can't work up the nerve to actually do it. And, according to Angier's diary, Borden plays a potentially fatal practical joke during one of his shows, but that's it. They even come to respect each other over time, and they both regret ever having the feud; in the movie, Angier, posing as the Duke of Caldlow, threatens to put Borden's daughter (who by this point, doesn't have a mother anymore) in a workhouse when he is locked up, and has no qualms either about killing his doubles or about locking Borden up for a crime he didn't commit. In the movie, Borden is the hero; in the book Angier might actually be slightly more sympathetic, since according to his notes most of the feuding was done by at least one of the Borden twins. The change in the morality makes them completely different characters.

One thing that did amuse me about the movie was that on the sign in a theater at one of Borden's magic shows, Harry Dresden was listed.

The Illusionist

This may be the most disappointing Edward Norton movie I've seen (which granted, isn't saying much, since Edward Norton is generally awesome). It also takes place in the 19th century, and the plot is straight out of the Brothers Grimm - the carpenter's son (later known as Eisenheim the Illusionist) falls in love with the daughter of a duke (and vice versa) but they cannot be together because class status. Woe. Twenty years later, he helps her escape from her eeeevil husband-to-be (the crown prince of Austria) by faking her death and then framing the crown prince, using his skills as a magician. The trick is not revealed until the end, but it's not that hard to figure out, really. The CGI magic tricks are much more impressive.

And there is also the issue of morality - how far is too far with a trick? The illusionist frames the crown prince for the death of his wife, and as a result, the crown prince commits suicide. He's certainly not the best guy ever - there are some vague insinuations that he mistreats his wife, and that he planned to overthrow the empire because he thought it was too democratic, but the only violence we see out of him comes during a scene where his wife has actually drugged him in order to create such an impression for the chief inspector. He's also a bit full of himself and demanding of his servants, but this is only to be expected, really. If his hatred of democracy and his character flaws are supposed to be his only evil characteristics, I am less than impressed. The chief inspector, who is assigned to find out who killed the wife is happy when he realizes that she wasn't killed at all - he should be happy that she didn't die, I suppose, but how can he be happy that someone was killed for a crime they didn't commit? Throughout the movie, he remained loyal to the crown prince, but generally seemed to act on his own sense of right and wrong and fair play. I don't think he would have mourned the prince's death, but I don't think he would have been rejoicing.

Another Post About Fantasy Novels

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:13:30 GMT

I found another great book in my couch. This one shouldn't have been a surprise though, because it was my absolute favorite book all through high school. I hadn't wanted to try and reread it, because other attempts to reread books I loved when I was younger only made me realize how much I've outgrown them and how many bad writing habits their authors indoctrinated into me. But this one is still just as awesome as I remember it being; the characters are interesting and believable, the dialog is funny, the plot keeps going strong for 800+ pages, and Rawn put a lot of effort into building but not overbuilding the world. It's got strong female heroes and strong female villains. Why aren't there more fantasy novels like this? And for god's sake, why has Rawn still not finished this incredible series? It's a book I can really just curl up with and enjoy. It was the kind of book I always wanted to write, and what made really want to start writing (well, that and avilina).

I feel like talking about books today. I'll probably swing back around eventually, and go back to rambling about programming or linguistics or religious philosophy, or whatever it is I usually post about, if I post at all. I've hit a roadblock in reading, but I've still managed to finish some new books.

Like most of the rest of the world, I read the seventh Harry Potter book back in July. Since then, I've seen people talk about how much they liked it, and how much they hated it. Me, I'm not sure; I really liked it in some ways, and really hated it in others. Basically the problem is that it doesn't really seem to belong to the Harry Potter series - it's a completely different kind of book than the other six were. On the one hand, the main characters are no longer in school, so the minor villains no longer consist entirely of Draco Malfoy and evil teachers who won't let Harry do exactly as he pleases. The action happens in the real world, with real consequences and real risks, and eventually, real results. The wizarding world gets new depths that were never really touched on in the other books, which automatically makes it more interesting than at least books 4-6.

On the other hand, this new genre clearly isn't JKR's forte. The setting sets us up for real risks and real consequences, but JKR is too squeamish to actually kill off any of her characters who actually has an individual personality. She makes up for this by killing off scads of minor characters that no one really gives a shit about because they had no characterization and then milks these deaths for as much angst as she possibly can. Strangely enough, some real, honest-to-god interesting characters do die, at the very end, and no one even sheds a tear, after they spent chapters wailing over the deaths of more pointless characters. And, while a lot of new, interesting stuff was introduced in this book, it makes no fucking sense. Not only is it internally inconsistent, but it doesn't really go together with the rest of the canon. It probably wouldn't be so bad if the "daathly hallows" were a new development in the HP world, but they are depicted as being an ancient fixture of it. This is all supposedly foreshadowed by itty bitty details from the other books that I didn't even remember, but really it feels like it was hacked together at the very last minute.

The style had a few good parts, but the completely superfluous melodrama really killed it.

I'm not sure how it compares to the other books. How do you compare well-written childrens stories and a mediocre fantasy adventure novel, when fantasy adventure is your favored genre?

Speaking of wizards named Harry, despite all the terrible things I said about Harry Dresden, and I went and bought the second books and read it. I'm really getting to like his world, now that he's getting into the rules behind it. I mean, it's exactly the kind of urban fantasy that sets out to explain how mythological creatures could possibly exist in the real, non-mythological world, and succeeds in fascinating ways. The style is not my favorite, but it's growing on me. The main characters still aren't thrilling me, but the minor characters are actually getting to be likeable. Even Dresden's hopelessly cliched mission to save the mundane world from evil magic-users is getting more depth. And Jim Butcher writes really awesome monsters, even if seeing the hero constantly getting the crap beaten out of him is not quite so cool.

I think the moral of this post is that Dresden > Potter. And I will be buying more Jim Butcher books. And that I have yet to find a fantasy adventure story that is better than Melanie Rawn's (still unfinished) Exiles trilogy.

Maybe this is God's way of telling me I need a new (lighter) laptop.

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 20:01:34 GMT

Computational Linguistics professor: "Um, there's been a horrible mistake and this classroom doesn't have any computers in it. I want all of you guys to bring your laptops to class so that you can write perl while I lecture. Yes, at 9:30 in the morning on the day when you have to have three or four long treks across campus to get to other classes."

My back is going to die this semester. If only I had a way to secure the laptop to my waist like those gimongous camping backpacks do. On the other hand, this means that during all the "Ok, this is a while loop. This is how you use the assignment operator." lectures, I can debug my java homework and look like I'm actually paying attention.

Monsoon 2007

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 03:42:01 GMT

Now, I know there was already one terrificly large and inconvenient monsoon storm this summer, because I got caught out in it in my car (and because of that it probably seemed more inconvenient than it really was...) but the one that happened this afternoon was pretty serious, too. I woke up at around 1 PM (because it's Saturday, after all) because the wind was getting very loud. Then it started to thunder and quickly began raining in buckets. Maybe ten or twenty minutes after I woke up, the power in the entire apartment complex went out, and as of yet it still has not come back on. Apparently there was a downed power line a few blocks away, and they still haven't gotten it fixed... I think I spent like a half an hour or so reading in front of the picture window and watching the window be completely submerged in rain, despite the fact that it was under an awning. It was like someone was throwing buckets of water onto the window, over and over. Stuff that was lying under the awning near my door was swept right off the balcony by the rain. Even after it stopped storming crazily, it continued to rain normally until around 4 or 5, and I still have no lights. Or refrigeration, but by some stroke of luck I don't think I have much that's perishable in the fridge right now.

It's actually kind of amazing how well a single candle can light up a room. I wouldn't have thought it would have much of an effect, but I've never had to try it before.

Looks like I'll be haunting coffee shops this evening then. Fortunately, the rain has cooled everything down to a reasonable temperature, so I won't need the air conditioner. But man...

Twenty-one-year-old cars give the best birthday presents

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:45:29 GMT

On Saturday, my car began randomly stalling when I stopped, or, eventually, whenever I put it into neutral. I almost got it home before it became impossible to start and displayed symptoms of overheating, which is really odd because the temperature gauge was quite low at the time. Anyway, hopefully the shop will be able to tell us what's wrong with it.

As of yesterday, I am now 23. Man, I thought I would be done with college by now. Well, I suppose I probably only overshot it by two years or so, so maybe that's not too bad. But all those fireworks that everyone in America is going to be setting off tomorrow? Independence Day, my foot. Those are for me. Are you setting off fireworks in honor of me tomorrow?

As for my much belated recounting of my reading list, I have an honest-to-god excuse for not updating it now, which is the notebook I'm tallying it in is in the car, which is still in the shop. But I do know the numbers, which are:

April: 4 books
May: 1 book, due to finals and all that jazz
June: 0 books, because somewhere in there I stupidly deleted a 2500-line C++ program and have spent most of the month re-designing GUIs.

Plus, I'm just getting around to reading that Sam Harris book, which periodically makes me have to get up and smack my pillow around a bit. When I finish it, there's going to be a rant post. It's going to be long. Really, I just need to work some more fantasy books into my rotation. I didn't really mean what I said here... fantasy beats out sensationalism any day.

"Documentation" of old code

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:18:45 GMT

When I go back through programs I haven't worked on in months, I find amusing stuff in the comments sometimes:

int frogboots; // Note: must not be greater than four

// What the hell is this variable supposed to represent?  
// I think I drew a diagram or something in one of the Latin notebooks.
// Gotta find that then.

// Does this member function actually get called anywhere?
// YES.  For the love of God, stop deleting it.

// It ain't broke; stop fixing it.

// DEBUG ME

I guess when it's 3 AM there's no one else to talk to except future me. Maybe programming is just a kind of extended conversation with myself, where I go away for a while, get some new ideas, and return to add more insight to the discussion. Feels like it sometimes, anyway. I can look back at this old documentation and remember what I was trying to do and what I was frustrated with and why. It's the kind of stuff that gets edited out of writing and art because it's not part of the finished product, but the compiler doesn't care about comments. I've got something akin to a little comment-blog running on the top of one source file. I guess if nothing else, I can always look up there and remind myself, that yes, I have actually built quite a few things that really do work. Or did, at some point.

I missed April's accounting of the books I read, probably because of finals. Strangely, I only finished one book for May. I'll have to find my list and update that tomorrow, before school starts again.

It's that time again.

Wed, 30 May 2007 03:17:49 GMT

Every year I almost forget how ungodly hot it gets here in the summer. At least in a month or so it'll be monsoon season, and there'll be rain every day to make up for it. But still... The sun comes in through my apartment's west-facing window every afternoon and heats everything up; the only solution is to be out of the house from 11 to 4 so that the blinds are closed then. Even so, it's hot when I get back. I don't like running the air conditioner in the evening, because it doesn't take long to cool off the whole place that way, and when I start it and go to sleep, I wind up waking up two hours later because it's freezing cold. Like any native Tucsonan, I prefer too-damn-hot to too-damn-cold. At least I've never woken up in the middle of the night because it was too hot.

I have a summer programming class that starts on Monday, but since I have nothing else to do this summer, I want to get back into writing for a bit, or conlanging. It's nice not to have school take up all my time. Maybe I could even, you know, actually get a job.

Incidentally, I have a new conworld, and I'm using a community for it (so that I don't have to log out): adeya_ne. Maybe this one will actually go somewhere; I think the more I do this, the more rational the conworlds seem.

Fantasy Premise of Geeky Awesomeness

Tue, 08 May 2007 19:56:41 GMT

My syntax professor, who has a sense of humor befitting someone who plays with words for a living, put a question on our final which quoted a fantasy novel and asked if one of the sentences involved an insertion transformation.

The humor? The novel (which was written by a conlanger/linguist) is about a world in which magic is done by applying the rules of Transformational Grammar to physical reality, and the passage was describing how the wizards of this world had transformationally inserted a wall around a city.

I must have this book. Must must must.

People amuse me.

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:47:12 GMT

Since I'm usually in coffee shops these days to use the internet, I usually set up my laptop first and attempt to get on the wireless connection. If I succeed, I buy coffee. If I don't, I pack up my things and find another coffee shop.

Part of this process involves asking other coffee-shop denizens if they can access the internet. It's really funny how as soon as you admit you're having trouble with wireless everyone else turns into a wireless networking expert. I get a lot of advice like "you have click on your browser icon," or "maybe you should refresh your connection," and offers to walk me through it with some wireless network organizing program native in Windows XP. They get very confused when they discover that I'm not even running windows, let along XP, and when even more I start talking about "ifconfig" and "ping," or even "SSIDs."

I can remember a time back at Grinnell when there wasn't WiFi and most of the people I talked to didn't know the difference between a wireless card and an ethernet cable. Or maybe that was just because they were all liberal arts students or something. Heh.

"I do not make the rules. This annoys me, and so I comfort myself by breaking them."

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 02:56:21 GMT

I really shouldn't be doing a lot of reading right now, but having god-awful complicated syntax trees to diagram gives me too good of an excuse to take breaks. And it turned out to be one of these 3-day books again, so eventually I just forgot about the syntax trees entirely. But I really shouldn't be surprised; it's the other sequel to Swordspoint.

A character from The Fall of the Kings, which was written before The Privilege of the Sword but which takes place 45 years after it, has this to say about the life of the Mad Duke Tremontaine:

Scandal number one: young noble went to University to study instead of to drink.[...]Scandal number two: got kicked out, went to live with a swordsman in Riverside.[...]Scandal number three: inherits Tremontaine and fills the house with scholars, reprobates, and lovers of all, ah, shapes and sizes.[...]Scandal number four: he was driven into exile, passing the duchy to his niece, the Lady Katherine Talbert.

The Privilege of the Sword is the story of the Lady Katherine Talbert, who at 15 was summoned by her uncle the Mad Duke from the peaceful countryside to make her fortune in the city. Is she going to dress up in fancy gown and go to Society balls and meet her rich and politically felicitous husband like every other young girl in the known universe? No. Her mad uncle takes away all her dresses, replaces them with boys' clothes, and has her trained to be a swordsman.

She does get quite into it, and fuelled by idealism and swordsman-romance, she tries to step in to right a wrong, as every honor-bound swordsman should, and winds up caught up in the already-unstable political games of her mad and extremely contrary uncle. It's got the swordfights. It's got the wit. It's got strong female characters in a world where early arranged marriage is the done thing and divorce isn't. It's got theater. It's got scandal. The Mad Duke Tremontaine brings the crazy; he is like the archetypical eccentric uncle times ten. (The quote in the title is his.)

By the way, the "privilege of the sword" refers to the right of the nobility in this world to have someone killed at swordpoint - provided it was a matter of honor. The crazy disfunctionality of this world is a beautiful thing.

You should read Swordspoint first, though.

Maybe I like playing Devil's Advocate too much...

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:17:06 GMT

So, in tribute to another 3-day book, I am giving preemptive commentary on Storm Front by Jim Butcher, though not for the same reasons as last time. You Harry Dresden fans will gather here, and tell me that for goodness' sake it's a fantasy novel, and that you don't expect those to be literature, and none of the things I'm about to expound on actually matter, because you only read it because it made you happy, and that's all you wanted from it. I get that. I'm not trying to insinuate that anyone else has bad taste in their reading material, or assert some kind of elitist self-righteousness over anyone. And I mean, I did like this book. In some ways, it is everything a fantasy novel needs to be. But I think that fantasy is literature, and I have things to say about Storm Front.

Harry Dresden seems to be a kind of a cross between Harry Potter and Dirk Gently, except without JKR's quirky magic or Douglas Adams' humor. A magical private investigator is an attractive premise, but I think it mostly goes downhill from there. This bears enumeration:

1. Women
Women in this book largely seem to exist in order to be eye candy for Harry Dresden. Seriously, some of these descriptions or women could be straight out of Guy Noir: Private Eye, and admittedly, this is exactly the kind of prose that Guy Noir is meant to mock. After a while, I started hearing them all narrated in Garrison Keillor's voice, which made them a bit less wince-worthy, but only just. You can tell right off the bat which women are actually going to be given character development of any kind, because they're the only ones that do not immediately turn Dresden into a puddle of drool. Rather, they are patronized, and patted on the head for being good little sex-objects-in-denial. All the women turn out to be variously incompetent and have to be saved by Dresden. Since most of the characters in the book other than Dresden are women, I have to say it was really hard for me to find anyone in this book to like.

1.1 The Vampire
The vampire in this book (because, with the amount of cliched magic, there had to be a vampire) is not actually really a woman, because in Dresden-verse magical creatures are more like animals than like human beings (which makes a lot of good sense to me, actually). The scene with the vampire was actually kind of interesting; there was actually theme and characterization, a little discussion about what it means to be a Nevermore creature living in the mortal realm. And then the vampire ceased to have anything to do with the plot, and none of the themes appeared anywhere else in the novel. I am disappointed.

2. Magic
To go back to Harry Potter for a minute, there is a lot of magic in that book which is highly improbable and not well explained. This is OK, even for me, because JKR makes no attempt to explain anything in Potter-verse and much of it is some kind of reference or joke in any case. Butcher, on the other hand, does seem to have some desire to explain how magic is done and why it works - he injects just enough understanding of actual science into it that you can believe it has some real basis to it. And then he stops. There's no further explanation or exploration of this magic, or really anything very interesting or unique about it. What does seem like it might be interesting if were developed is never gone into at all - for example, Dresden seems to be able to contain incorporeal things like mouse patters and candlelight. How does he do it? Never explained. Bob is an air spirit with no vocal chords. How does he "talk"? Is it telepathy? Some kind of glamour? Never explained.

2.1. Pseudo-Latin
Although it takes several chapters for Dresden to actually use magic, he mentions fairly early on that spells are based on pseudo-Latin. No, that's not me just be pejorative, the word he uses is "pseudo-Latin". Now, I can deal with pseudo-Latin. Pseudo-Latin means that the author picks a bunch of Latin roots, and a bunch of Latin endings, and mixes them up into an ungrammatical pastiche that vaguely resembles Latin. But a lot of the "pseudo-Latin" in Storm Front isn't even related to Latin. off the top of my head here:
Fuego - come on, everyone knows that's Spanish, don't they? The Latin is ignis, or hell, you could even take something related to "ardent" or "arson" and get half-decent pseudo-Latin. But fuego?
Pulitas is apparently a cleaning spell involving a broom. -tas words in Latin seem to be abstract concepts (veritas, libertas, etc), but the only word involving pul(l)it I can find in my dictionary has to do with chickens, making pul(l)itas "the abstract quality of being a chicken. Good pseudo-Latin involves recognizable roots that have something to do with the related spell. Bad pseudo-Latin is a cleaning spell that means "the essence of chickenness."
Veni che is a levitation spell. Veni is good pseudo-Latin. It's a real Latin word, but it's certainly in the wrong tense (or possibly, mood). Che doesn't strike me as remotely Latin-like at all. Where did he get it from? I have no clue.
If Butcher was just going to make up random words like pulitas, why didn't he just make up his own naming language? It's not that hard.

2.2. Inconsistencies
This magic is full of little things that subtly annoyed me. Early on, magic circles are defined as a physical barrier type of magic, which works against supernatural objects but which can be voided by passing objects from the mortal realm through it. In something that looks very much like a deus ex machina, though, an object passes through a magic circle to Dresden, who's trapped inside it, without disrupting it. This is later smoothed over by saying that since it was thrown by Bob, the air spirit, it didn't count. Now, I can believe a lot of things about magic, but a flying object is a flying object, whether it was set in motion by a human, a thermodynamic event, or an air spirit. What if the object is propelled by some kind of magical slingshot, being used by a human? There's way too much gray area for that to fly.

Secondly, magic seems to interfere with electricity. This actually makes some sense, since Dresden uses the power of a lightning bolt somehow later on - if magic can exploit electricity, it makes sense that magical people might have deleterious effects on nearby electrical equipment. Later in the book, though, magic causes a gun to malfunction. Now, I don't know a whole heck of a lot about guns, but I'm pretty sure they're mechanical. Furthermore, Dresden himself has a gun, which he relies on, and which, earlier in the book, completely failed to malfunction when exposed to magic. I'm going to call deus ex machina again.

3. Little things
The writing grated on me a bit, even when it wasn't expounding on the sexual gorgeousness of women. It's informal enough that it makes it sound like Harry Dresden is bragging about his adventures rather than telling a story. This is all in the first person, did I mention that? it wouldn't be that bad if I had actually liked the character that much, but the only time I wasn't annoyed at the first-person narrative was during the action scenes. The dialog was clearly meant to be funny sometimes, but it felt kind of stilted and cliched to me most of the time.

The plot was OK, but the plot devices were obvious and unsubtle. It really helped that most of the last part was action, which doesn't require anything subtle or well-thought-out, but other parts of it just had me rolling my eyes at its predictability, when it didn't come out of absolutely nowhere. Actually, the plot almost bullies you into liking Dresden, due only to massive amount of improbably bad luck and unfair treatment that comes his way - rather unsporting, I thought.

The only theme in this book (aside from the one from the vampire scene which never got developed) was effectively the recycled great-power-brings-great-responsibility theme from Spiderman, which is not only boring, but really doesn't work for a story whose main character doesn't see himself as a hero. Part of what makes me want to reread books is that they have enduring themes that are real and convincing. This theme sounded like it was there because it was the only theme Butcher could come up with for a story about magic.

In spite of all this, I did enjoy reading the book. I'll probably read more. It has action, just enough of a resemblance to mystery to be interesting, and lecherous talking skulls. Sometimes, that's enough.

Harnessing the mystic powers of incorrectly written Japanese

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:32:35 GMT

So, at the urgings of various people, I bought Storm Front by Jim Butcher - that is, the first book in the Dresden Files. Now, when I bought the book, the cover seemed to be a picture of a guy holding a staff with some kind of vaguely runic writing on it. Upon close inspection, now that I've started reading it, it actually seems to read matorikkusu in mirror-image katakana.

Someone please tell me that the book involves a staff with something written on it in backwards Japanese. With what I've read so far, I can believe that the guy might keep something like that around, but seriously.

Come to think of it, most of the "Chinese" in Serenity that I saw was actually mirror-image katakana too. Maybe mirror-image katakana is just the not-quite accurate mystical runic scribbling of choice in the SFF community. Hell, if Harry Potter magic can derive itself entirely from the untapped potential of dog-Latin, mirror-image Japanese should work pretty well too, right?

"I had no idea it was so bloody complicated to be a criminal mastermind."

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:24:23 GMT

Which is to say, March Books! (The quote is from The System of the Word.)

I really did mean to read more this month. I thought I'd finish Only Revolutions this month too, but I've got 8 x 6 pages to go on it. Well, this just means I'll have until next month to think up a concise way of explaining that crazy awesomeness that is Mark Z. Danielewski.

On the other hand, for once I have (almost) nothing to complain about.

10. Words and Rules by Stephen Pinker
I picked this up ages ago and never finished it for some reason; if you don't know, its a linguistics book with a neurological focus. Pinker's not particularly revolutionary after you've taken more than a few semesters of linguistics, but he's easy to read, and amusing, he's got interesting ideas, and he deals with parts of linguistics I don't usually think too much about. By the way, if you're not a linguistics person, his books are also things I'd feel safe recommending to people who don't know anything about the subject.

*11. The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman
The sequel to Swordspoint, so of course I had to read it. I don't think it was as good; it has significantly less of some of the major things I liked about Swordspoint: swordfighting, borderline insanity, and witty dialog. It's also about twice as long. It's got more of the romance and less of the crazy; it's got politics, but this takes place 60 years after Swordspoint, in a somewhat more civilized world, so no one is being killed because of honor and no one's life is really on the line until the very end.

On the other hand, it's still a great book. It goes into a lot more detail with respect to the worldbuilding and the history of the fantasy world, and follows up on some rather loose ends that were mentioned briefly in Swordspoint about the University. Essentially, it is a story about the (relatively) new-age enlightened (or at least popular) intellectualism versus an almost Arthurian romanticism about kings, and it's got a kind of Arthurian magic realism to it also. It bogged down for a bit in the middle, but the only thing I could find to complain about when I finished it was that it probably could have 100-200 pages shorter. I don't think there was anything lacking in the plot; it just went on a bit longer than necessary.

*12. The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
Why has this book been on my list since January? Because it is 1000 pages long. Not only that, but it is the third such book in a series. Neal Stephenson is the only author I've ever read who can keep a story going for 3000 pages and never have it become boring. I've even got my father into this, The Baroque Cycle, which I think it pretty damn impressive.

The Baroque Cycle (consisting of Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) is historical fiction. But since it's by a SF author and is about the time period (17th-18th century) when Natural Philosophers and Alchemists were just starting to figure out what real natural science was about, its full of the kinds of philosophies and theories that were going around in people's heads at the time, specifically the philosophical falling-out between Isaac Newton and G. W. Leibniz. It's also full of interesting philosophies regarding the nature of money; and what's a 17th century European historical novel without wars, politics, pirates, notorious vagabonds, Turkish harem girls who grow up to be French Duchesses, and the Elixer of Life? It's really impossible to sum this up in any way, because it goes everywhere. Real historical people show up as major characters in fascinating yet historically accurate ways. I could go on, but let's just say that it's awesome.

Now on my list:
Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter
The Hollow Hills by Mary Stewart
Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard E. Friedman
The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien (because it's been far too long...)

Determinism and Idealism

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 17:16:40 GMT

From time to time I muck around with C++ and turn out a simulation program, which is basically just a souped up random-number-generator in that it simply generates random numbers without letup and then arranges and presents them in ways that make sense to humans. Sometimes the results of some prior random number generations effect the results of further random number generations, but eventually they all trace back to the first number generated. This is further exemplified by the fact that the random-number-generating function is not really random - it's just so complicated that it might as well be, as far as humans are concerned. Additionally, it generates the same set of random numbers during the course of any given function, and if you want it to do differently you have to feed it a "seed" - which either isn't random at all, because its based on the computer's clock time, or it's just generated using another not-quite-random number generating program. No matter how complicated you make the random number generation, on some level the results all come back to the time you started running the program and what specific code was involved. In other words, no matter what crazy things your sims (just for the sake of example) might seem to do, their fates were all written in stone the moment you started the game.

It seems like people have been arguing about the existence of free will since the beginning of time, in every field imaginable. Philosophy goes without question; with math you get the whole random-number-generating issue; anthropology has a legacy of psychic unity, biological and cultural determinism at odds with some mysterious force of nature called "agency". Language seems to have rules but is actually fraught with irregularities. Even physicists are starting to wonder if what they observe isn't effected by the fact that it is being observed. The only thing that can't seem to approach these levels of randomness is our own understanding of them, and our attempts to recreate them with computers. It's an unreachable goal; no matter how close we come to getting actual randomness that mimics actual reality, we'll never get there. We are chained to the logical, the regular, and the particular. In some sense, the purpose of all science is to use regularity and patterns to break free of regular forms and specific patterns.

To me it looks a bit like a religious quest for Ultimate Truth, but the weird thing is that every religion, it seems to be the god of good that represents regularity and order and law. Why, when our goal is clearly to find ultimate randomness and chaos, which represents what we think of as free will? If there is anything in us that is free to do what it pleases regardless of laws of nature, it is the ultimate random number generator. Shouldn't law be a subset of constraining earthly vices, and chaos be supernatural enlightenment?

Incidentally, there is one religion that has it the other way around; but since I had a hand in inventing it at the time when I was becoming disillusioned about precalculus and my co-inventor was certifiable, I'm sure its not representative.

TGISB

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 02:35:43 GMT

Syntax Professor: So, English has this past-tense node as the head of its syntax trees, which comes before the verb phrase, and you can't actually hear, but trust me, it is there. But there's this rule, you see, that moves this inaudible tense-marking down the tree to verb and changes the vowel in "run" to an "a". Ok, I know it sucks but it's the best we can come up with, right?

Right. I guess it's a little better than the English-teacher explanation which is generally something like "because my English teacher told me so."

And now it seems that there are actually two whole sets of Japanese that we are going to have to learn again from scratch almost, because practically everything in Japanese has an "honorific" form and a "humble" form, and sometimes they don't even look anything like the original verb. And, since you can actually honorificify (that's a great word, isn't it?) and humblify everything, even words like "do" and "be", you can actually do infinite regressions of honorificification (and you get words that look kind of like that). And now it also seems that Japanese can make passive forms of verbs that don't even have direct objects...

It'll be good to get away from this for a week.

The Nature and Quality of Villainy and February Books

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 20:58:58 GMT

A long time ago I made some post babbling generally about villains and what makes a good villain and how villains are important to my enjoyment of stories. Now that I'd reading more books, with more variously ambiguous characters in them I have something more concrete to add.

First, some definitions:
Main Character: The character whose actions the story is primarily meant to chronicle.
Protagonist: Any character (including the Main Character) whose primary purpose is to further the actions and goals of the Main Character.
Antagonist: Any character whose primary purpose is to impede or otherwise prevent the actions and goals of the Main Character.
Sympathy: The degree to which the author wants the reader to like any given character.
Morality: The degree to which any given character acts based on principles and ethics rather than self-interest.
Good Guy: Any sympathetic character.
Bad Guy: Any unsympathetic character.
Hero: A sympathetic protagonist.
Antihero: An unsympathetic protagonist.

Stories need main characters, protagonists and antagonists. They don't necessarily need good guys or bad guys, though they certainly need at least one or the other. Normally, stories have moral heros and amoral unsympathetic antagonists. It doesn't necessarily have to happen that way, though: Antiheros can make excellent stories, and atypical combinations make stories interesting. One of the things I really liked about Swordspoint was that it had amoral heros, as its sequal is showing me by its conspicuous lack thereof. Essentially, it meant that the antagonists were not dispicable fiends for the sake of being dispicable fiends. One of my January Books, Devices and Desires, had an amoral, sympathetically ambiguous main character, accompanied by a lot of independantly loyal, mostly sympathetic antagonists who were all working at cross-purposes. Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle originally had several sets of independant heroic characters; in the third volume they are intruding on each other's stories and becoming mutually antagonistic. Stories like this are more interesting simply because the "winner" is no longer a foregone conclusion.

So what's a "Villain"? I think it's a combination of a lack of sympathy and antagonism, though a sympathetic character can also be classed as a villain if they are antagonistic enough, like some of the former heroes in the Baroque Cycle, or Boromir from LOTR. A villian is a character who loses to a hero, essentially, or, if there are no heroes, than at least a good guy of some flavor.

I've developed a kind of chart to rate villains and explain what I liked and didn't like about them. It consists of a kind of cartesian plane (because everything makes more sense when expressed as a function of x, right?). The one axis is of "evil" (heh) which is mostly a measure of morality but has some elements of sympathy. The other is what's marked on the chart as "Rational/Irrational" which is partially based on sympathy, partially based on character development (which informs sympathy to a certain extent) and partially based on the extent to which the character's motives actually make sense. These are both no doubt subjective qualities, but I find them useful for categorizing villains.

Here's where various types of villains fall on the chart, give or take. They break down into:
Boring: Self-explanatory, I think.
Inoffensive: Not quite as boring as the above, but I still can't bring myself to care about them in the grand scheme of things.
Likeable: Not quite the same thing as sympathetic, but it's hard to really hate these villains because they're too much like real people with real motivations and feelings. They make bad Dark Lords, but they're fun to read about.
Tedius: You can't hate these guys either, for the same reasons you can't hate a gun for killing someone. These villains are little robots that exist for the sole purpose of causing moral outrage; they're not human enough to hate.
Hateable: The more usual kinds of villains that make good antagonists in most stories. They're believable enough, and evil enough to hate, but unsympathetic enough that its satisfying when they die.
Fascinating: These are rare, but they make wonderful antiheroes. You want to hate them, but they're just too interesting.

Not all villains can be represented on this chart. For example, where does Sauron go? Obviously he's evil, but how do you judge things like his motives or his character development? There are also quite a few other "villains" is LOTR that more correctly qualify as "monsters," e.g. Shelob, or the Nazgul, or the various hoards of orcs whose motivations do not seem comparable to those of non-monsters like Saruman and Gollum. There's no real point in trying to make more of some villains than they are, but these aren't the kinds of villains who make or break the story for me either.
Here's a plot of some LOTR villains that do make the cut, though:

And here are some Harry Potter villains:

It's difficult to judge evilness when it's all from the point of veiw of teenagers who sometimes seem to hate rules more than they hate bad guys. Umbridge was just this shy of tedious; Lockhart's no antihero, but there's something incredibly vile and incredibly understandable about him all the same. Snape's always been an inoffensive villain to me, but at this point he's more at the crossroads of inoffensive, likable and hateable. He could go any way in book 7, but I doubt he'll end the series as an inoffensive character.

Years ago I read The Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop, which has some of the most tedious villains I've ever read about. I couldn't bring myself to hate Greer; I just wanted him to go away so I didn't have to hear about him anymore. He didn't even have the good grace to die when killed. The only really interesting villain in that whole trilogy, in fact, was Kartane, and he was only a minor villain.

Conversely, I liked Melanie Rawn's books (her Exiles books and The Golden Key) because they had good villains. Sario is the most excellent antihero from The Golden Key; he stole other people's bodies so that he could feed his genius. Unlike, for example, Lockhart, though, he was a genius; even the sympathetic characters almost weren't able to apprehend him, even after they knew what he'd done. Glenin from Exiles is a great female villain who's more evil for her believable devotion to her cause than for anything she actually does. It's difficult to say whether or not Auvry Feiran is really a villain, since he's a more or less sympathetic character, but he did turn to the dark side, after all.

And now for February books:
(*'s mean I actually started the book this year)

*6. Flatland: A Romance in Multiple Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot
I remember my father trying to get me to read this, and I don't know why I never did. It's a trip.

7. The Book of Ti'ana by Rand Miller, etc.
I really like Myst, and I like the idea that there are books that go into the history behind the characters in the game, but I don't think this one stands up on its own as a fantasy novel. The story is kind of bland, and not terribly unexpected, and there are some major plot points that are never really explained effectively. There wasn't enough of Gehn, and the villains that were a part of the book were somewhat disappointing, especially compared to the ones from Riven and Exile (I'm not passing judgements on Sirrus and Achenar until I finish Revelation).

(Veovis and A'Gaeris are from the book; Gehn and Saavedro are from the games.)

*8. Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
c. f. this post.

9. Harry Potter y la cámara secreta by J.K. Rowling
I'd forgotten how much I disliked Lockhart the first time I read this (in English) and most of the plot details as well. The Spanish didn't have Lockhart's alliterative book titles, though, which I missed, as well as some other wordplay that I didn't really notice until it wasn't there. It's the nature of the beast, I suppose.

My current list is:
Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski
*The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
Words and Rules by Stephen Pinker
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter
*The Fall of Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman

Interesting new developments

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 01:15:50 GMT

I've been crawling all over campus today trying to get more information on things like study abroad programs and computer science minors. I think I probably already have enough credits for a Japanese minor if I wanted to just graduate, but you know, Linguistics and Japanese is not exactly the most useful of degrees to have. I'm good (or at least not too bad) at programming and I've been doing it amatuerly for years, and only have one class worth of credit to show for it. It's time I got acknowledged for my geeky hobbies, dammit.

So I figure, I've got 1-2 more years left of college (at least, undergrad) after this, which makes it a good time to do a study abroad too. I feel like I've been held back a semester or so in Spanish, since the U did not count all of my credits and now I have to retake a semester. When you get the best grade in the class for a test you didn't really study for, it's time to move on. But it looks like maybe next semester, maybe the one after, I can go to an actual Spanish-speaking country and take actual literature classes in Spanish, which is what I would be taking now in Iowa if I'd stayed there. Annoyingly, there are still more prereqs for these, but maybe I'll be able to take them, or convince someone that I don't need to.

There is a building on campus called the Gould-Simpson building, which it probably either the tallest or one of the tallest buildings on campus, and it is an ugly blot on the horizon whenever you can see it. Most of the buildings are at least interestingly shaped, or if they aren't they are quiet and demure about it. Then there's this thing in the middle of campus that looks like some kind of office building. Today, in search of the computer science department, I discovered a place where it is not possible to see this building - namely, from inside of it. But being 10 storeys (actually 9; who decided that floor 1 was the basement? I thought only the Brits were that confused about the meaning of the word "storey") you can see practically the whole campus - all the interestingly shaped buildings, and all the trees (there are a lot more than there seem to be on the surface), the wending bike-streets, the city to the east, and off to the north there's the foothills, with all the expensive adobe houses and the mountains. It's beautiful. I need to get me some classes in that building, so I can sit there and look out the windows.

The essence of a Liberal Arts degree

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 22:27:03 GMT

Today I turned in the strangest Latin assignment I've ever been given: write a letter to your rich relatives in Latin about why they should send you more money. Because, you know, Cicero's son did it, so it must have been a good idea.

Being able to ask your parents for money in a dead language? That's lifeskills, right there.

On a less linguistic note, there were junior girl scouts selling cookies on campus today. It's been ages since I bought girl scout cookies, in fact I don't think I've actually bought any since I stopped selling them myself. I had to go buy some, of course; they keep changing them around, but at least they never get rid of the samoas. But the things are now $4 a box! That's almost twice what they were when I started selling them; the price goes up faster than gas. But it made me remember sitting outside drugstores and banks selling cookies when I was a cadette in middle and high school. It was very odd to see them on the university campus.

The troop leaders all got terribly excited when I mentioned that I'd done my gold award, five years ago now, I guess. It's odd, but it doesn't seem like such a big thing anymore.

Language, Fiction, and Suspension of Disbelief

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 02:47:40 GMT

So I've been reading the second Harry Potter book in Spanish, partly to improve my reading ability with Spanish and partly because I've actually forgotten a startling amount of the plot of the earlier books. Just the other day, though I remembered something from the English version, and just had to look it up in my Spanish copy to see how it was translated, even though I haven't actually gotten to that part yet. (I'm going to assume that anyone who hasn't read the Chamber of Secrets by now doesn't care about being spoiled.) This is the part when Harry is trying to open the Chamber of Secrets by talking to the taps in Myrtle's bathroom in parseltongue, and failing. Harry says "Open up.". Ron says, "Nope. English."

So I had to go and see whether the Spanish translation translated Ron's words, or his intent. In the Spanish, it says lo has dicho en nuestra lengua, "you said it in our language." What a way to pussy-foot around the issue. Now that I think about it, it doesn't really seem like it would have been all that bad to just have left it as inglés. I mean, they're two English kids going to an English boarding school. Why on earth would they be speaking anything other than English?

If I read an English-language book that was not in translation about people who were meant to be speaking a non-English language, it wouldn't seem wrong to me to hear them talking about the fact that they were speaking in that language - and the same thing goes for people in fantasy worlds where the characters are intended to be speaking in fantasy languages. So it seems kind of silly to get worried about what to do when it is a translation. I do remember having one weird moment when I was reading some story by a British author who used some grammatical constructions that seemed very British to me in the dialog of characters who were meant to be speaking a totally unrelated language - Russian, or Chinese, or something - but for the most part, the language the story is written in shouldn't have anything to do with the language the characters speak in, should it? Maybe it's different if you grow up bilingual or if you're reading something that's not in your native language. Who knows? But I've never really thought about it before.

All that is gold does not glitter

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 03:43:11 GMT

So, I figured when I started this book-reading project that I'd just update it once a month, but I think this one needs to have a post all to itself, because it was just that awesome. I refer to Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner.

There's a story that gets told all over the place about a guy who dreams that there is gold buried underneath some distant mountain/bridge/castle/etc. When he gets there to dig it up, he finds another guy who has had a dream that there is gold underneath a quaint little farmhouse. The guy then goes back and discovers that the gold was buried in his backyard the whole time.

I've spent an amazing amount of time in used and new bookstores, and a lot of additional time wondering why I could find no good fantasy novels to read. Then I found metaphorical gold buried in my couch. I think someone recommended it to me years ago, and I remembered that and bought it at some point, and then it was lost. I must have uncovered it during recent excavations aimed at ordering my bookshelves.

Anyway, the book.... there are books that you pick up and read when you feel like reading a book, and there are books that you cannot stop reading; you just have to put it down for a few hours every so often so that you can eat, sleep, go to class, do homework, and do everything that precludes the reading of books (a category which can be reduced by surprising proportions, I've found). Since high school, the only books that have fallen into the latter category are written by Terry Pratchett - not necessarily because he's such a great author, but more because its very hard to justify putting down a book with no chapter breaks. Until now, that is, because I spent about three straight days just reading Swordspoint.

The book is about a swordsman living in a fantasy-like setting with a European-like aristocracy that likes to hire commoners to fight duels-to-the-death for them. There is thus a little niche group of commoners called "swordsmen" who do nothing but learn swordfighting, get contracted by nobles, and have a shared mythos of honor, danger, and death. Naturally, someone who fights to the death for a living isn't particularly well-balanced, but this particular swordsman is outshined in the crazy department by his lover who is not only crazy, but also suicidal and a little sadistic. And he doesn't fit in; he talks and acts like a noble, but he dresses like a scholar (which lifestyles are mutually exclusive in this world) and no one knows where he came from. They are fascinating.

Then there is intrigue, involving stupid nobles, spurned lovers, kidnapping, blackmail, an extremely pissed off swordsman, and, eventually, a dead body cut into sixty billion itty bitty bits. You'll have to take my word it's exciting, because posting more would be spoilery... and then it winds up. This books has one of the tightest plots I've ever seen - it's less than 300 pages, and already contains more plot than Kushiel's Dart, which was three times as long. And that wasn't a bad book. Watching the plot unfold is sort of like watching a fast-burning fuse. Another major reason to love this book - unlike most others of this general genre, the dialog is just as witty as the narrative claims it is. It's got everything, in 300 pages.

January Books

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 01:24:33 GMT

So it seems that this year, many people are getting into this reading-50-books in a year thing with 50bookchallenge. I thought about it, but I don't think I'm so much interested in reading 50 (or however many) books from start to finish in a year, but I do have, at last estimate, approximately 300 books in my apartment that are nearly all partially read. My problem is that I'll find a book, or buy one, and read a few chapters; then I get bored, or inevitably wind up in a used bookstore, find another book, and start reading that one. So I have all these books that I read a few chapters of weeks or months or years ago. It'd be a worthy goal to actually finish them all. So that's what I'm doing this year - and the next, and the next, and the next... until I have read every book that I own.

My father defines "owning" something to mean that you can sell it, but I don't really feel like I own a book if I can't tell anyone what it's about. I'm not going to exclude anything - not audiobooks, not ebooks, not books that I actually did finish ten years ago but forgot about, not that book I bought from Borders for a dollar just to see what kind of tripe got sold at new bookstores for a dollar. It'll all be read.

Since the beginning of the year, I've been attempting to do this and keeping track. Here are the books I finished in January (I've starred the ones that I actually did start this year):
*The Royal Book of Oz by L. Frank Baum
- :D I think I need to reread more Oz books.

A Wizard's Holiday by Diane Duane
- This has to be one of my favorites in the series so far, I think because for some reason I like Dairine better than Nita, and she has a more prominent role. The general lack of angst made it better too.

Devices and Desires by K. J. Parker
- This is the kind of book that makes me glad I haven't given up on the fantasy genre yet. It's got an unmagical world where people have actual social and economic concerns, and the characters and their motivations are extrmemly realistic, and sometimes a bit cynical. The only problem is that it seems the only way to get most of this author's books is through amazon.com.

What is the Name of this Book? by Raymond M. Smullyan
- This isn't actually my book in the first sense of ownership because I ganked it from my father. It's a book of complicated and somewhat philosophical logic problems and paradoxes, but until now I've only ever read one chapter.

Kushiel's Dart by Jaqueline Carey
- bugly42 suggested this to me ages ago, and eventually I remembered that and bought it. Then I read through the first 500 pages or so very quickly because they were actually very good. Then it took on a definite Robert-Jordanish quality for the last 300-400 pages and it sat around in my apartment with the last 250 pages unread for months. The first hald probably made up for the second half. I'll probably read the sequels too, but I'm not terribly thrilled by it.

Because I'm not the kind of person who can read a single book for any appreciable length of time, I'm trading off bettween five different books at the moment:
Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski
*Flatland: A Romance in Multiple Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot
The Book of Ti'ana by Rand Miller, et. all of Myst fame
Harry Potter y la cámara secreta by J. K. Rawling (it really has been long enough since I read the English that I've forgotten what happens...)
*The System of the World by Neal Stephenson

And now I must go and draw many syntax trees in the Gimp, or I will never finish them all for Tuesday.

Must be that "Dumb American" stereotype at work

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 19:53:48 GMT

Meteorology professor: "Everyone else in the entire universe uses Celsius, but because your government thinks y'all are too dumb to figure it out, we got stuck with Fahrenheit."

Huh? Celsius may be a better choice of temperature scale to do science with, because it (and the metric system) are geared toward base-10 numbers, but it's no harder to grasp than the Fahrenheit scale. The reason we use Fahrenheit is because that's what gets used everywhere else around here. I'm perfectly capable of understanding all the metric units, but if someone asks me what the temperature is, or how tall I am, or how many miles it is to Phoenix, I'm going to answer in Fahrenheit, feet, and miles, because when it comes right down to it, you don't use the boiling point of water to make judgments about the ambient temperature.

I like how he tries to imply than he's not one of us, too. Maybe he's some kind of alien? It would explain how he knows what temperature scale they use in the whole rest of the universe.

Spanish professor: (in Spanish) "Today we're going to review the present perfect[...] Now, those are just the regular forms. Here are some irregulars...[...] English has some irregular forms of the present perfect too. For example, take write. Is the present perfect I have writed"?
Me: "I have [rI?ən]." (=written)
Professor: "You have to speak up, and pronounce all of the syllables. You see, in Spanish we have to pronounce all of the syllables, and we have to use all of our muscles, so we get good at using them. English-speakers are lazy, and they tend to omit syllables. Because I have all this experience of speaking Spanish as a first language, I pronounce it [ritɛn]."

Yes, the glottal stop [?] is not an allophone of /t/. It's just me being "lazy" and forgetting a whole syllable! And I even split my infinitives! Oh dear! I never expected to get a lecture in Spanish about how I should be speaking English.

And I thought it wasn't possible...

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 04:33:52 GMT

From the Book of You Know You've Been Spending Too Much Time on the Computer When...:

"... you finish a written homework assignment and start looking for the "File->Save" option."

Maybe in the future I should spend breaks doing something other than experimental GUI programming...

Obligatory First-Day-Of-Classes Post

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:07:04 GMT

There was a minor issue with some fee for some test that that I took last semester, which they could have billed to me right after I took it, but which they managed to postpone until it created problems with my registration. Having got that taken care of, I in fact have manged to register for classes this semester. You know, I don't think I've had one single semester where registration went as planned, except for the very first one.

The computational linguistics class I wanted to take has been canceled. Ughhhh.

So, I have contented myself with suicidally taking both second semester Latin and fourth semester Spanish simulataneously. However, I get the feeling that both of these are going to wind up being review courses:

Before I left Grinnell, I actually had taken the equivalent of fourth-semester Spanish which they had - a class that is more of a literature class than a grammar/language class, and it was actually pretty fun, and pretty challenging when I took it. However, the Spanish department at the U does not have any class that is anything like it, apparently, so they cannot count the credit as equalling forth-sementer Spanish. So I have to take fourth-semester Spanish again in order to get credit for it and be able to take any other higher-level Spanish classes and to make my language requirement. (I could also use the Japanese class I'm taking at the Community College this semester, but then I'll lose the first two semesters' worth of credits and have to find something else to minor in.)

Class was very odd. It made me realize that the last actual Spanish grammar-related class I had was in my first semester of college. I've taken some literature- and conversation-oriented courses since then, and read a bunch of books in Spanish, but I haven't had an out-and-out Spanish language class in years. It's very strange to go back to some guy going on like "now, kids, don't forget your accents. Accents are very important. Can anyone tell me what it actually means when you write tengo 20 anos?" I wonder what it's going to be like to take English again. Haven't had one of those since high school; I tested out of them at Grinnell.

Latin really is a review this semeter. I actually took half of second-semester Latin the year I wound up coming home, so I've done half of it already. This profesor even uses the same book that we used, so I've probably even done all of the assingments and readings already. Well, at least it's two fewer books I have to buy. The one really annoying thing is that the profesor stresses some of the words wrong, and my previous professor was a real stickler for the pronounciation, so I've got an ingrained response to twitch anytime anyone else in the class says something.

The rest of my classes are tomorrow; a gen ed and a Syntax course. They should about balance each other out. And then there's a Japanese class that doesn't start until the 16th. That's two classes four days a week, and three classes two days a week. And no class at all on Fridays. Nice.

Emergency road trip

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 19:03:49 GMT

So my dad decided to buy my sister a car, but since he bought it in Tucson, she had to drive it all the way up to where she was actually going to use it, which at the moment meant getting it to Ann Arbor in time for Christmas. The car was drivable the evening of the 22nd, which left 20-30 hours of driving to do in approximately two days. I got nominated to be back-up driver.

Starting on Friday at around 7 PM, and finishing up on Sunday, at around 2 PM, we drove all the way from Tucson to St. Louis, MO, where my sister left me to take a plane home. Apparently she got in at around 11:30 PM on Christmas Eve.

Fun facts about driving across the western half the country:
- In New Mexico they have these things called "safety corridors". You're driving down the highway and suddenly a sign pops up saying "Safety Corridor, next 20 miles". Every half a mile or so after that, helpful signs begin appearing along the road saying things like "Lights on for safety!" and "Speeding tickets are double in the Safety Corridor!" and "Speed limit enforced by aircraft." Ironically, some of these 'Safety' Corridors are in the general vicinity of Albuquerqe.
- I-40 is the most boring highway I have ever driven on. From Albuqerqe all the way until Olkahoma City, all we saw was shrubs, except for Amarillo which is a little hard to miss.
- The Texas equivalent of the Safety Corridor is to arbitrarily declare a construction zone, narrow the highway to one lane, reduce the speed limit to 60 miles an hour and replace yellow stripes on the pavement with concrete walls.
- Every single town in Oklahoma is preceded by an advertisment sign which were all stamped out from exactly the same mold. They even have the same font.
- Changing highways in Oklahoma City reminded me of those games where you have a little plastic board that you have to turn around and around in order to shake the little silver balls into the "1000 Points" hole. It felt like someone was trying to shake us out of Oklahoma City, but kept having to turn everything around again to get us unstuck.

In other news, my dad has discovered a new TV series called House, which looks sort of like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and ER. Unlike the kind of TV shows my dad usually gets into, this one is kind of growing on me.