what i think about science today

Science is about useful narratives. Those that are backed up with lotsa numbers and/or clear testability/falsifiability are all well and good, but any narrative is worth listening to if it helps us see what we haven't seen before. That doesn't mean we shouldn't demand the sharper-edged claims as much as possible, but nor does it mean that we should miss out on more imaginative approaches just because they don't always immediately offer open-and-shut testability. Often if we give them a chance, they will in fact do so in the end, just a few further exploratory steps down the line. The best intellectual efforts are those that understand and respect not just the value of rigor, but also the unlimited potential of an ever-generous curiosity. That's science to me.

20120323

we use the old to handle the new

this is how ancient languages (and most all languages are ancient)
handle the new modern world

this is how we all handle new information
in conversations: new, buffered via the old and familiar

this is how a learner handles a new language,
improvising towards the new
with whatever is old to them, familiar to them, easy to them, readily
used by them.

this is how we use the old to handle the new,
the familiar to handle the novel.

[it is your family, your elders, showing you how to go out into the bigger world of the unknown]

Event structure and programming languages

So here's an idea I'm working on: that a programming language based on event structure---more precisely, the linguistic/cognitive representational model thereof---will be intuitive and easy for a wide range of programmers to use.   Now breaking down events into sub-events has long been a fundamental task for much of programming.  To say the least.  The advantage of basing yet another such system on natural language/cognition is that it should align our computational breakdowns of event structures (i.e. chiefly as instructions on sub-events to execute) how we naturally perceive them. This alignment isn't always super-obvious, since languages tend to lump some sub-events together into chunks while parsing others out (see the work of Leonard Talmy for lots on this, and I may revise with examples therefrom).  But these kinds of analyses of the sub-elements of event structure are in my experience quite easy to learn---perhaps since they simply aim to reflect the cognitive structuring what we all already implicitly know. More on this later.

Ghost phonology in Farsi false codas

So the deal with Farsi is that it has false codas. Glottal stops only in the most artificial speech: otherwise it's just the same pre-cluster lengthening, just before no actual cluster. Ghost phonology again, like Irish mutations: the (morpho)phonlogical persistence of the past.