ICTS

cognates: leña - lignite / udire - oír

how many times have you injured your foot while playing sports in a dream?

could we estimate the number of meth labs in a given metro area by consulting reports of theft of copper tubing from construction sites?

why does singing one ant with glowing metal cause the whole recrudescence to disperse?

has anyone ever written a book about the history of bribery?

me hice monja

my investigations have during the past three weeks have led me to formulate a revolutionary new crackpot scheme for proper urban survival:

1. avoid staring at things that glow, except for fire.
2. sit down to eat your meals, and eat a strong breakfast.
3. as much as is possible, avoid knowing what time it is.

nessuno lo veda, sorride

some web magazine that i was reading recommended turning your digital alarm clock away from you so that you can't see it in the evening, for two reasons:

1. the photons (~630nm) will penetrate your eyelids, waking you.
2. when you wake up during the night you will see what time it is, and become anxious about losing sleep and then not be able to go back to sleep.

i tried out the idea and found that #2 is worth expanding on. looking at the clock makes you worry if you have to wake up early, but it also makes you lazy if you don't have to wake up all that early. you wake up, feel more or less well-rested, then decide whether to get out of bed. how do you decide if you should get up?

deciding to wake up is like deciding whether to stop drinking; it's a hard sell unless there is a good reason to do it, and even the best of reasons can be defeated through careful, fallacious reasoning. when deciding whether to wake up, the question you ask yourself is not "what are the benefits of waking up?" rather it's "what are the consequences of not waking up? how serious are they? could i conceivably amend for them without any scandal? can something be arranged?"

so when you wake up and see that it's 7:43, the first thing you will think is "i can safely wake up at 8:00, let's go back to sleep." if you wake up and all you know is that it is daylight and the alarm hasn't yet rung, then you can no longer make calculations. it might be two minutes until TIME, or it might be a full hour. when you have an indefinite amount of free time, you will be productive, but when you have a known amount, you waste it.

time is one of those things that, when observed, becomes tainted. since it is the medium in which you act, having any information about it modifies it, restricting its domain, and thus restricting your ability to act.

from this idea, i intend to build a technique of looking at clocks as little as possible. if i have somewhere to be, or something to do, i will simply set an alarm to go off when i have to start moving or doing; i'll not look the clock.

when the clock indicates how soon a pleasurable activity will cease, conscience of the temporal nature of the pleasure degrades it. when the clock indicates how much longer a displeasing activity must be endured, we are reminded that the present is not something of esteem -- lacrimae temporum patiendorum.

it's not polite to make fun

one area of interest for those who would theorize about creole genesis is the the imitation of foreign speech and accents.

Balzac writes the utterances of the Kolb, the Alsacien laborer in Illusions perdues, so as to imitate his accent. we see two apparent transformations to proper parisien speech.

the first is a voicing/devoicing:

-- Trôle t'ome ! [Drôle d'homme!] -- devoicing of voiced consonants

-- U vaud-il nus diriger ? [Où faut-il nous diriger] -- voicing of voiceless consonant

the voicing and devoicing often occur in the same utterance or even the same word:

-- Mon maîdre ne ferra chamais la gouleur te fodre archant ! [Mon maître ne verra jamais la couleur de votre argent !]

Balzac applies the transformation to consonant graphemes, without regard to whether they are actually pronounced in speech:

-- Gommand, mon maître et fus, bouffez-vus vus rengondrer... [Comment, mon maître et vous, pouvez-vous vous rencontrer]

the next transformation is an un-rounding of vowels,

-- C'haimerais mié monder à l'assaut t'une padderie... [J'aimerais mieux monter à l'assaut d'une batterie...] : [ø] --> [e]

... Le plis sire ede te gager mon maîdre. [Le plus sûr est de cacher mon maître] : [y] --> [i]

however, Balzac doesn't carry out the operation consistently when he tried to apply the un-rounding transformation whose proper result would produce a vowel not found in the French phoneme inventory.

-- Et c'edde bar indérêd pir nus que affez bris eine bedide egelle ? [Et c'est par intérêt pour nous que avez pris une petite échelle ?] [u] -/-> [ɯ]

wrench in the cogs.

these google ads from an email conversation in Pidgin show that the technology is still young.

Designer Tuxedo Rental
Elegant designer tuxedo ensembles from Savvi Formalwear. View online!
www.SavviFormalwear.com
Massa Ultrasonic Sensors
Cost Effective Transducers for Control and Automation Applications
www.massa.com
Shop For Ya-Ya
Shop Bloomingdales.com for all the Top designers and latest trends.
www.Bloomingdales.com
S.A. Recasens
Filetti i fornitori e li tesse protezione solare
www.recasens.com
Remote Server Control
Remotely Access Servers via LAN, WAN or the Internet. No Rack Space.
www.tripplite.com

BLF

NSA_3
Originally uploaded by Billboard Liberation Front

here is a great project by the Billboard Liberation Front. the fiirst time i saw something similar was in early 2002. a billboard on the drag had been modified from

WE CAN BE AFRAID, OR WE CAN BE READY -- READY.GOV

to

WE CAN BE AFRAID, OR WE CAN NOT BE AFRAID -- READY.GOV

false cognates!

traduce: to expose to shame or blame by means of falsehood and misrepresentation. (Merriam-Webster)
traducir: Expresar en una lengua lo que está escrito o se ha expresado antes en otra. (Real Academia Española) (to translate)

on this note, i would like to start a website cataloging false cognates. who would like to design it and collaborate on it?

anais

staring through the pore of a saltine cracker

crippling, moist, summer heat
inhaled with the scent of mesquite

a man with a baseball cap he never removes
smokes a cigarette without knowing it.

sigur ros

here is a fascinating interview with that band. a must for fans.

.

?In Europe,? she writes, ?the subject matter of science and history lessons taught to children in all publicly supported schools has always been determined by highly educated employees of central education ministries. In America the image of an educated elite laying down national guidelines for schools was and is a bête noire for those who consider local control of education a right almost as sacred as any of the rights enumerated in the Constitution.? excerpt from S. Jacoby's Age of American Unreason, reviewed here.

it is interesting to add to this an excerpt from The Federalist Paper #51:

"Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government."

sticky green

consider the following monosyllable english verbs, all rhyming:

eat (ate-eaten)
beat (beat-beaten)

treat (treated-treated)
greet (greeted-greeted)
cleat (cleated-cleated)
seat (seated-seated)
pleat (pleated-pleated)
bead (beaded-beaded)
seed (seeded-seeded)
heat (heated-heated)
heed (heeded-heeded)

plead (pled-pled)
feed (fed-fed)
meet (met-met)
breed (bred-bred)

them rubber bands

the lead up to the weekend has shown that it was long-anticipated. since fucking tuesday.

when there is a homework problem that one calculus tutor can't do, we have a conference and tell each other that sleep will be lost if nobody knows the answer. a recent conference produced this conclusion:

given an n+1-times differentiable function on the interval [a,b], such interval containing a point c such that f'(c) = f''(c) = f'''(c) = ... = fn(c) = 0, and the (n+1)th derivative is not zero,

if n+1 is even, (c, f(c)) is a maximum or minimum point
if n+1 is odd, (c, f(c)) is an inflection point

it was rush hour when we went out to buy ingredients. duylinh and i agreed it's cool to have a campaign poster in your front yard only if you stole it from someone else's front yard, especially if it's rick momney, no, mick momney, no, rick romney, mick romney, i totally saw some mick romney signs in hide park like when i was driving home from work, imagine you'd have to steal them because his campaign offices are closed and you can't have one in a legitimate way.

i wanted to buy kaffir lime leaves, but didn't have cash. i couldn't think of anything else that i wanted that would add up to $n minimum purchase at indian grocery store.

we kept driving by and i received a phone call as we pulled into the super china hong kong dragon happiness market parking lot.

-how good is your portuguese?
-so-so.
-can you translate some government documents for me into portuguese? you see, i have this scheme. i found a loophole and i can get portuguese citizenship. it'll cost about $200, though.
-well worth it. it's a good ace in the hole.

that was the first of two calls i fielded about people who needed my recipe for chocolate chip cookies. after the second call i agreed to make a house call, where i was sitting on the couch holding a writhing dog in my arms like a load of laundry where a sock always falls out and i very carefully stoop to pick it up without letting another sock fall going down the hallway, a dog who only wanted to chew on my shoes so long as they were on my feet. it whistled through its nose like dogs do when they're excited.

johnny was playing the new Devin tha Dude album

tell me why oooo why
you won't let me get between them thighs

-i want to listen to miles davis. he doesn't sing about his dick.

proposed coquinanda:

:frijoles rancheros with salt pork and black rice
:bobó de camarão
:panang beef
:yarrow ale

enough light in the daytime

Dr. Fertig presented an interesting paper called (Ir)regularization in Germanic verbal inflection: A word-and-paradigm, dual-mechanism account

it challenges the idea that verbs made from nouns (denominals) in English are always conjugated regularly, even when they rhyme with irregular verbs.

e.g.

kite: v. to go in a rapid, flighty manner. (kite-kited-kited) NOT (kite-*kote-*kitten) as in smite-smote-smitten OR write-wrote-written
king: v. move in checkers. (king-kinged-kinged) NOT (king-*kang-*kung) as in sing-sang-sung

because there are well-attested exceptions.

e.g.

string-strang-strung: v. to tie up with string
sling-slang-slung: v. to place in a sling
shoe-shod-shodden: archaic v. to put shoes on

the modified theory is that the denominal always starts out regular, but then gets irregularized for different reasons. the most interesting reason is that people sometimes intentionally change the verb's conjugation to try to be humorous or singular, as when i jokingly claim that the pie should be divode in a way that no one feels cheated. there is even a german website that encourages the "strengthening" of verbs thus.