I don’t have too much to say about the UAE port take-over deal because the safety of American ports is a little remote and abstruse for me way over here in Australia. But I wanted to point out a couple of things:

1) Don’t you think it’s weird that Bush is willing to go to the wall over this one? He’s said he’d use his first-ever veto in the service of handing over port safety to a corporation owned by a foreign government with ties to terrorists.

2) I wanted to call attention to the technique Bush is using. A quote:

And so I, after careful review of our government, I believe the government ought to go forward. And I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British (sic) company. I’m trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to people of the world, we’ll treat you fairly.

Shorter version: Are you saying Middle Eastern folks aren’t as good to work with as Great British… um… folks? What are you, some kind of racists or something?

Here it is again, but this time about Iraq’s capability to govern itself:

“There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern,” Bush said.

It’s exactly what he did when he went after Kerry on his war record. You attack your enemy on issues where you yourself are weak and they are strong.

Modern Democrats own the high ground on racism. Republicans talk equality, but excoriate Equal Opportunity laws, ignore black populations (Katrina, anyone?), rework slavery into an argument for their hateful abortion narrative, and use race-baiting from time to time (a la Willie Horton). So Bush is having a poke at Democrats for being concerned, calling them racist. Puts them on the back foot.

Classic Rove playbook.

If you shop very often at IKEA, it’s a very good idea to learn how to pronounce the interesting Swedish characters. Otherwise, you might get in trouble. I bought a HÖGBO mattress there last Saturday, and when the worker repeated my order, she said “Hogbo” in a very Australian accent. So I wasn’t sure. Was I going to get a mattress, or one of those scary heart-shaped pillows with arms?

The characters that come up are:

Å – AKA the A-ring
This is the sound [ɔ] in IPA; it appears in English words “war” and “boring”. Easy.

Ä – or A-umlaut
This one has two variants: it usually sounds like the [ɛ] from the word ‘get’ or ‘red’. But if it comes before an ‘r’ sound, it becomes [æ], which is sort of halfway between ‘feather’ and ‘father’. Don’t worry too much about that; we cover that in our Advanced IKEA class.

Ö – or O-umlaut
In IPA, this looks like [œ]. It isn’t so tricky. It’s the same as [ɛ], but it’s rounded. Try saying the word ‘get’ while making an ‘o’ with your lips, and you’ll have the sound.

So now, armed with knowledge, you can be confidant in your pronunciation of the names of household goods and the people who design them.

I explained all this very patiently to the helper, but she was like all ‘whatever’. I wonder why they don’t train the workers more carefully in Swedish phonology. It’s going to cause a problem there someday. A big one.

I was talking with Mom on the phone. She’s been worked up over the state of the world. “Everything’s getting worse,” she says. “Things that are good seem evil and things that are evil seem good.” She’s either been at church or watching the news.

“Oh, really?” I ask. “What makes you think so?”

“Well, there’s all kinds of evil these days that there didn’t used to be, like people living together. Now it’s an accepted thing.”

And here I thought someone had been eroding fundamental human rights or arguing for torture or something. But it’s all about cohabitation. Yeah, people living together is a really big problem. Probably strikes right at the heart of The Family, which is still under attack, by the way. I decided not to tell her that I’d joined a gay commune where we make crystal meth. It wasn’t the time.

I hate that old ‘hell in a handbasket’ routine. When crime rates fall, fear stays up. Pretty soon, you’re on some sort of psycho millennial thing, lamenting that we’re in the last days, and won’t please somebody save us from the eeevil to come. But there’s nothing you can do about it because you bought into a death spiral narrative that will only get worse until Jeebus comes again, which is happening precisely when? so you’re hosed.

And yet, aren’t some things getting worse? I watched “Good Night and Good Luck” recently. It feels like we’re a million miles from the time where our world story-tellers had that kind of integrity, and a zillion miles from where people cared if they did. Look at voting behaviour in the USA. Look at the worldwide rise in fundamentalism. We can go backward as well as forward. Are people getting suicidally dumber?

But now it’s time to assuage. I tell Mom, “My take is that people are no better or worse than they used to be. There are some evils that people accept now, but there are other kinds of evils that people will no longer accept.”

I keep thinking of a scene from ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues‘ by Tom Robbins. It’s the one where the wise man called the Chink gets wounded in an explosion.

Sissy sobbed on his bedside. “Is everything getting worse?” she cried. “Yes,” answered the Chink, “everything is getting worse. But everything is also getting better.”

I have yet to run across praise for Wikipedia that doesn’t use the word ‘actually’. As in “It’s actually quite good.” Which means, “I expected it to be stupid and amateur, but it wasn’t.”

I think Wikipedia is wonderful. Not the least reason is that the articles are usually timely, detailed, and actually quite good. When I’m trying to understand something new, it’s the first place I go. The articles on linguistics and computer science are always quite good.

But I like Wikipedia in theory just as well as in practice. The idea of a knowledge-base that anyone who’s interested can add to is just fascinating. Know something about anything? Jump on in! It runs on the power of free time. And it’s constantly being combed through by millions of eyes, which is the one thing that the Internet is really really good at.

Of course, one must put on one’s Critical Hat when reading, as anywhere else. Wikipedia’s great strengths make for some big headaches. Vanity editing. Persistent vandalism. And pseudoscience topics where the nutballs have more energy than the detractors, and spend more time editing.

But even with all that, I’d say that a knowledge repository like Wikipedia, with its self-review and huge breadth, has the potential to become one of the towering achievements of our age. No kidding.

How clueless am I? When driving, I listen to Triple J, the youth-oriented radio station, and I enjoy hearing Jay and the Doctor in the mornings. But I just found out that they’re both from Frenzal Rhomb! That made them about a hundred times more interesting! Did you know? I think everyone knew but me.

Not that I’m in Triple J’s sought-after demographic. When I voted online in this year’s Hottest 100, I had to click in my age bracket. The categories were quite fine-grained at the younger end, but less so as the scale went up. As I remember, I was in the rather broad 25 to 39 market. And after that? Forty to death. Yes, that’s right. There’s only one age category after forty! If you’re 40 or 99, it’s all the same to JJJ. You’re in that ‘decrepit, but still spry’ demographic. It was the most profoundly depressing thing that had happened to me all day.

How do you maintain a youthful outlook without appearing pathetic? Um… by that I mean, I know how I do it; how do you? Yes, that’s what I meant.

An amusing post from Geoffrey at Language Log about shit.

The sentence I didn’t write shit today is ambiguous: the idiomatic meaning typically says you didn’t write (or at best, you wrote essentially nothing); the literal meaning typically says that you did write, and what you wrote could not be described as shit. But, I just noticed today, the two roughly opposed meanings can both be true in the same situation!

It reminded me of a bumper sticker on the back of a pick-up truck in my hometown:

If you ain’t a cowboy, you ain’t shit!

Which led us to wonder: does this mean that if you are a cowboy, you are shit?

But let’s not forget another usage: not just any shit, but the shit. ‘Shit’ is just shitty, but if you are truly great, my friend, you are the shit.

Emilio wasn’t afraid of shit, he didn’t run away from shit, cuz he was the shit.

Whence this difference? We could cop out and say that ‘the shit’ is simply a non-compositional multi-word expression. But naming something is not explaining it, and surely someone would see through all that jargon, and expose us for the frauds we are.

Alas, the OED Online does not have an entry for ‘the shit’. My best guess: By analogy with the template “Something is the something.” E.g. “You are the cat’s pajamas.” Note that this is how the superlative is normally formed in English: ‘the’ + adjective-est.

Students have asked me if I would do a lecture on swear words. I said no because I didn’t want to feel like Bob Sagat at the end of a lecture. But it is interesting.

In which we check whether personality tests are for real, or just big steaming piles. Of crap.

Try this:

1. Go see this colour personality test.

2. Take it twice; once for real, and again just clicking random squares.

3. You’ll get two personality descriptions. Without reading them (do your best), copy and paste both descriptions into two separate text files, being sure to label which one is the real you, and which one is bogus.

4. Also copy both descriptions together into a third file.

5. Now in this third file, mix the two descriptions together so you don’t know which statements come from your real test and which from the bogus one.

5. Mixed them up enough? Okay, now one by one, decide if each statement was a ‘hit’ or a ‘miss’. If a line contains more than one statement, break them up.

For example, this line is actually three statements.

May be physically unwell, in need of gentle handling and considerate treatment.

6. Now that you’ve judged all the statements, it’s time to reveal! Open up the two other files, and find out how many hits and misses there were in your real and bogus descriptions.

For me, the bogus one had 8 hits, 10 misses. The real one had 11 hits and 5 misses. Ooo, looks good from here, right? but it could be a fluke.

7. We need one more step. The Chi-square test is a test for statistical flukiness. Go to the Web Chi-Square Calculator, make a 2×2 table, plug your numbers in (so, for instance, I had 8 and 10 in the first row, and 11 and 5 in the second row), and hit calculate.

Here’s what I got:

Degrees of freedom: 1
Chi-square = 2.02972709551657
For significance at the .05 level, chi-square should be greater than or equal to 3.84.
The distribution is not significant.
p is less than or equal to 0.20.

When it says “The distribution is not significant,” it means there’s no significant difference between the real and bogus test.

8. Post your results in comments. What did you get?

Oh, yeah.
9. Read about the Forer Effect.

The word of the day is:

AIBOHPHOBIA

defined as ‘an abnormal and persistent fear of palindromes‘.

If you’re aibohtriskaidekaphobic, you’re afraid of the number 1331.

From Overheard in New York:

Professor guy: I was going to give you all a quiz today. But then I realized that it was Valentine’s Day. You’re supposed to do something for the people you love on Valentine’s Day. And of course, I love all of you very much. So…I decided to give you the quiz on pink paper instead!

I’ve been living in Australia for 10 years, but I still sound like a dang Yank. “How long ya here for?” they ask. “I have no idea,” I tell them.

My accent probably isn’t going to change. I’d say it’s because I’m too old and my brain is less plastic than it used to be, but a) my kids talk to Australians all day at school, and they still sound like dang Yanks, and b) my brain is plenty plastic, thank you.

I have noticed a few features of Strine English creeping in though. Whereas I used to go heavy on the /a/ sound (as in ‘father’), I’ve noticed that I now lean much more toward the ‘turned script a’ /ɒ/. It sounds slightly more posh than the broad /a/.

And certain lexical items were bound to creep in. When someone says “Thanks,” the appropriate response is “No worries,” pronounced something like “Narries,” depending on the register I’m trying for.

Accent adoption probably depends a lot on the extent to which you are willing to embrace the culture that the accent represents. For a long while I held Australia at arm’s length because I thought I’d be living in the States again soon. But the USA seems like a bit of a zoo right now, and I wouldn’t mind staying here for a while. The accent will probably follow. Plasticity permitting, of course.