Oh yeah, that’ll work.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered government and cultural bodies to use modified Persian words to replace foreign words that have crept into the language, such as “pizzas” which will now be known as “elastic loaves,” state media reported Saturday.

This is the kind of thing that governments try to do with language all the time, and it never works. They tried to purge all the English words out of French, but people still say ‘le weekend’. They tried to purge all the French words out of English, but we still say ‘remorse’ instead of ‘againbitement’.

It may work in the official print, but people will say what they like. Why is that so hard for authoritarians to grasp? They always want to control the language. Remember ‘freedom fries’?

Of course, one great ultra-nationalist deserves another:

If you can’t say Pizza in Iran then this IS WAR as far as I am concerned!

Witness the birth of the Pizza Rationale. Sadly, it’s not the flimsiest pretext I’ve ever seen. Maybe if Bill Kristol hears about this, he can add it to the pile they’ve been working on for the last 10 years.

Knowing it’s Red State, I am strongly convinced that the author is not joking.

I’ve mentioned the Mirror Hypothesis before: the idea that when we see someone else doing something (like moving their hand), we show neural activity in the hand-moving part of our own brain. Michael Arbib (among others) thinks this was an important step in language because it meant we were then capable of recognising the actions of others and forming joint plans, which is what conversation is all about.

Now a new article about primates and language. They gave macaques PET scans and found that when they hear recordings of other macaques’ calls,

a) they show brain activity in their own calling centres, and

b) the areas correspond to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, two important speech and hearing centres for humans.

Macaque monkeys have a strangely human way of listening to the sounds of their mates, a study has found. When the primates call out to each other they make use of the brain regions used by humans for language processing, the research revealed.
…
Dr James Battey, director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in the US, said: ‘This finding brings us closer to understanding the point at which the building blocks of language appeared on the evolutionary timeline.

‘While the fossil record cannot answer this question for us, we can turn to the here and now – through brain imaging of living non-human primates – for a glimpse into how language, or at least the neural circuitry required for language, came to be.’

Now why is this article filed under ‘weird’? Is it because it has ‘monkey brains’ in the title?

How many times have I heard Mormon conservatives (but I repeat myself) sound off against the ACLU? Apparently, they’re getting in the way of America being Jesusy enough, trying to keep government out of the religion business.

I can never figure out why conservatives, who think government doesn’t work, suddenly think that government would do a super job promoting religion, and they’d do it just the way you’d want. Anyway.

I have said to a few people, “If the ACLU had existed during the Missouri period, they would have gone to bat for the Mormons.” But they have trouble with this because to them the ACLU is something Bad. Maybe they just don’t like the civil rights movement. Ol’ Uncle Ezra never did, and look where he ended up.

So now the ACLU has decided to defend perhaps the most odious sect of Christianity currently in existence — though it’s close — the Westboro Baptist Church.

A Kansas church group that protests at military funerals nationwide filed suit in federal court, saying a Missouri law banning such picketing infringes on religious freedom and free speech.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court in Jefferson City, Mo., on behalf of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church, which has outraged mourning communities by picketing service members’ funerals with signs condemning homosexuality.

Why do I like this so much? It’s not because I like the Westboro folks, the sort of people who get attention by becoming serial pests.

Is it because I sort of like it when Christians (soi-disant) get the chance to reveal their ugliest doctrines as a turn-off to others? Or that they get the chance to promote their hatred of homosexuality openly in public, instead of secretly within the walls of the church, as Mormons do?

I think this case sounds right because it shows the consistency of the ACLU. Even though the WBC is repellent, the Missouri state government is out of line. Free speech is already endangered enough in the USA without blocking protests, even misguided ones. Any time government is promoting a religion or persecuting a religion, there’s a problem, and that’s what the ACLU is trying to straighten out.

Where was the government when WBC was celebrating the funerals of homosexuals, anyway?

An interesting article about whale songs: Apparently whales in one group can learn the songs of whales in other groups. From student Libby Eyre:

“In 1985, the whales off the east coast of Australia were swimming up singing their old song, while the whales in Tonga were singing half of that song and half of their own song, which had some quite unique elements,” Eyre explains. “Then the east coast whales came back down singing a slightly upgraded version of their song.

“On the way up in 1986 each group was singing their own song of the previous year as usual, but by the time the guys on the east coast came back down in ’86, some of them were singing the old east coast song, some were singing the Tongan song and some were singing a mixture of the two. So perhaps some whales had come across from the Tonga group to the east coast group, or some east coast whales had gone across to the Tonga group and come back again, which is a long distance. In 1987 all the east coast whales that I recorded were singing the Tongan song.”

One thing I appreciate about the article is that the author mostly avoids specious claims about whale songs being a kind of ‘language’. It’s a mistake not avoided by this article in New Scientist, which follows a familiar pattern: make bold and outrageous claims in the first part of the article, and then abandon them bit by bit as the article progresses.

There may be repeating elements and sequences in whale songs, but no sign of actual syntax or recursion, which every human language shows.

There’s a prophet hollering on the street corner. People are passing him by, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s holding his big black book in one hand, and his mouth is saying things over and over. Tonight it’s:

“Everybody out there is looking for a thrill! But what they don’t know is that Jesus has the will! and the skills! to give you a thrill!”

I didn’t stick around long enough to find out if Jesus is like some kind of pill to take when you’re ill.

Talk about ill, though. When I was a missionary, we compared our activity to scattering seeds. It’s a benign metaphor; seeds grow food, and food is good for you. But I’d say that this kind of activity is more like spreading a virus. Ideas are like viruses (including this one) because they can catch in the mind of a host, and the host can propagate the idea through a community. Whether you think ideas are seeds or viruses probably depends a lot on how helpful you think the idea is.

What if a sick person were purposely spreading viruses among an urban population? People would wisely avoid him (as indeed people were avoiding the street prophet). They’d isolate him in a hospital until he got better. A mental hospital would be the right sort of place for someone who spreads mental viruses. But no, he’s still out there, still propagating.

Here I am in Sydney. I caught the 0:25 red eye, and came straight to the conference.

Did you know that airplane seats are ergonomically designed to concentrate the entire weight of the body onto one place on your ass? I’ll never know how they do it. It’s not like I’m not used to sitting all day. I’m in CompSci. Sitting on chairs all day is what I do.

But I’m not complaining. I’m having fun meeting up with everyone again, and gawking at computational linguist celebrities. Ooo, look, it’s Aravind Joshi. Dude — is Charniak here?

I have just finished presenting my poster/short paper. I did so with some apprehension. I always get a bad case of Perceived Project Inadequacy because everyone else’s work seems much more complex and intimidating than mine. But, do you know, people whose work I admire came up to the poster, asked me some tough questions, and then said, “Huh! That’s kind of cool. Let me know how it works out.”

Hott!

I am now going to have dinner, and then it’s off to stay at a youth hostel in King’s Cross. This may be the last thing I ever write.

I’m off to Sydney for ACL/Coling 2006, only the biggest and baddest conference in the area of natural language processing. I got a short paper accepted at SIGdial, which is of itself no big deal, but I’m just pleased to be there so I can shmooze. You should see me. You wouldn’t recognise me. I work that room.

So I may be posting slightly more linguistic things, or I may just tell you what Sydney’s like. Either way, you may have to wait on the Friday Random Five because I don’t have my usual system. How will I survive without music? I’ll just have to groove on the rhythm… of life.

From the Department of Very Obvious Results:

If you eBay, it’s better to snipe.

Bid late and win big—that’s the conclusion of two Korean researchers who studied online auctions on eBay and developed an equation that describes the relationship between bidding behavior and item winning.

People who bid just a single time, during the last moments of an eBay auction, are the most likely to win, say Inchang Yang and Byungnam Kahng, physicists at Seoul National University in Korea.

…and founders of the Sailor Moon DVD Collection Institute.

Well, how about that. You’re more likely to win if you snipe. Which is something that every eBayer knows if they’ve bid in more than three auctions.

There are also risks to banking on a last-minute attempt. Such bidders may find themselves unexpectedly busy when the auction closes or unable to get a very late bid to transmit successfully.

Which is the other thing that snipers have found. There is a strong inverse correlation between sniping with a dialup connection and winning.

Oh, all right. It’s good to have someone come and verify empirically what others have found by experience. But this piece of research probably only sounds scholarly to people who don’t eBay. To anyone who has, it’s bleeding obvious.

How about the interesting aspects of auction behaviour? People tend to pay more for things than they’re worth because

1) most bidders will stop at a reasonable price, but the highest bidder will often go over, and that’s the one who sets the final price.

2) Having bid a certain amount, people allow their final price to creep up, reasoning that an extra buck isn’t much more.

3) Having to fight everyone in the world for a Lilac Time CD makes the item seem that much more desirable.

4) There is some investigation to be done with ‘nickel-and-dime’ strategies. I never bid even dollar amounts; I’m much more likely to go for something wonky like $21.67. Bidding $21 helps me beat out those that stopped on $20, and the extra cents have even made the difference on some auctions, minimum increments notwithstanding.

Perhaps the Korean team could get a grant for these aspects of group psychology once they’ve finished watching the DVDs. Unless they’re too busy studying the effects of trying to sneak cash through the mail.