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.

I’m sitting here at my desk listening to “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” by Boards of Canada.

I first heard the Boards on RTRfm. They played “Sixtyniner,” and I thought it was pretty good, so when I got home, I downloaded it. And I downloaded two more songs by BoC. They were good too. So I bought everything I could find!

If I hadn’t downloaded the songs, I wouldn’t have known I liked BoC. I probably would have just listened to the thousands of discs I already have. But then I wouldn’t have bought all the Boards of Canada CDs. And that would be sad.

I’m buying music again. That’s got to be good for someone.

I was talking to another parent at my kids’ school, and we were talking about science. You have to understand — it’s a Steiner School, so the people there are much more likely to be new-age types and homoeopathy believers (among other things) than at other schools, with all the anti-science baggage that goes with it. (One parent once told me, “I like that science can’t explain why homoeopathy works.” My answer: “It can — gullibility.”)

Anyhow, this parent said something like “Science is all very well, but there’s a higher form of knowledge, and that’s intuition.”

Is intuition any good?

We have amazing brains. We notice things without even noticing that we’re noticing. Our brains are great at taking mountains of data and coming up with patterns. Not that we do it optimally, of course, but very well in most normal cases. So we could see intuition as our brains trying to come up with conclusions, in such a subtle way that we aren’t able to articulate how we arrived at these conclusions.

And yet… one has to watch out for confirmation bias. When we find out that an intuition was correct, we take it as a ‘hit,’ but we seldom notice intuitions that turn out wrong or that go unfulfilled.

There’s another possibility. I remember when a prominent BYU professor came out and said he was gay. Afterward, I heard a few students say something like “Oh, yeah, I had a feeling about him,” after the fact. I never heard anyone say that beforehand! Did they really have an intuition? Or did they retroactively rewrite the story of what intuitions they had in order to fit what actually happened? I suspect the latter. It’s easy to do. It makes you feel more knowing.

So if intuitions are so malleable and interpretable, what good are they?

In my work in Natural Language Processing, I get intuitions all the time. After all, I’ve been speaking a language for quite a while, so I should be able to have some shadowy ideas about what kinds of features would work best on a certain task, or what kinds of patterns we should expect in dialogue. But I never trust my intuitions unreservedly. I make every attempt to verify them. They don’t always hold up, but if they do, I keep them.

It’s all about keeping everything in its place. Intuitions, though useful, are down there with hunches and guesses. They’re certainly not above facts, as that Steiner parent would argue. That’s just upside-down. You have to know how seriously you can take an idea.

I’m watching the Cheney hunting accident story unfold with a bit of bemusement. It was an accident, though apparently a very careless one. (I don’t hunt, of course, so I’m not sure how easy it is to avoid blowing someone’s head off.) But it’s causing chaos — angry exchanges at the White House press briefings, miles of column space, accusations of cover-ups. It’s not stopping, it’s getting bigger, and I’m not sure why. There are tons of things you could be upset about with this Administration — wiretapping, body armour, Patriot Act, deficit — why is this event gaining traction when so many other more serious issues are being papered over?

Maybe this ties into George Lakoff‘s idea of the Idealised Cognitive Model, or ICM. In times past, I’ve tried to explain to family members and friends why invading Iraq (for example) was a Bad Thing. But they wouldn’t always accept the idea because it didn’t look like their idea of a Bad Thing. It didn’t fit their cognitive model (ICM) of someone doing something Bad. But a man shooting another man? That’s a very salient example of a Bad Thing. Trying to cover it up also looks Very Bad, in a way that anybody can see and understand. I think that may be why this thing is gaining traction and getting attention.

For another take, I defer to ReddHedd from firedoglake:

I think, as other have pointed out, that this is a microcosm of the whole administration:

1. Try to play tough, with a gun, or an army.

2. Fail to follow well-established rules, guidelines, and past experience (either out of ignorance or willful disregard, or both).

3. Get someone hurt or killed.

4. Try to keep the story under wraps for as long as possible.

5. When the story does come out, spin it so that there was no possible way the administration did anything wrong.

6. Blame someone else, where possible, blame the victim.

7. Make anyone who has a problem with it look like an un-American pussy.

Yes, all the attention over the accident is a bit silly, though it has revealed some larger patterns to a few people. And it’s not going to bring the Bush cabal down, I’m sure. But I’d just like to encourage Mr Cheney to take Mr Bush along on his next hunting trip. I’d also recommend that they use a slightly larger gauge, like the kind they use for deer or something.

I just found out about this survey showing that people in Western Australia are the nation’s unhappiest.

I’m not sure about the study. Seems to me they haven’t taken suicide into account. All the suicide victims from the other states have removed themselves from the sample. But here in WA, we’re unhappy, but not that unhappy. These respondents get included, though, and that’s going to hold down the WA results.

See, it’s very important to consider all the factors when you’re doing sampling.