Oct 31, 2009
Measuring meaning
Presumably, to be succinct means to cram a lot of meaning into few words. Best of Wikipedia (as always, thoroughly enjoyable) informs me that mamihlapinatapai is “listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the ‘most succinct word’”. That must mean it’s the single word that packs the most meaning, in any language. Whenever I hear of someone quantifying words, I wonder how exactly they define a word; in this case, what’s troubling is that in many languages you can keep inflecting, deriving and generally adding suffixes and modifying stems and combining words forever, so that by simply adding more and more stuff you could create a word that has an absolutely insane amount of information in it. But let’s forget about that for the moment and just accept that the Guinness World Record people have a working definition of word that mamihlapinatapai falls under but not a compound of fifty different words into one in, say, German. Let’s forget, too, that Guinness World Records aren’t scientific, the way you might say that Hydrogen is the lightest neutral atom because all those words are well-defined and have been measured scientifically — let’s forget that the Guinness Book of World Records is simply entertainment for a moment, and explore just what it means for mamihlapinatapai to be the most succinct word in any language.
If we assume that succinct means “packs most meaning”, a natural question is this: what exactly does “most meaning” mean? If I were to claim that actually “cat” packs more meaning than mamihlapinatapai, which Wikipedia says means “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start”, how exactly are you going to refute me? If one word is the most succinct, that must mean there is some way of quantifying meaning. There must be some unit of meaning that allows us to put a higher number to “mamihlapinatapai” than to “cat”, or at least some kind of well-defined order, so we that given two words, we can always tell which one packs most meaning. What might this unit or measurement be? What are the atomic parts that meaning consists of?
Take cat. You’d think it’d be obvious that “cat” packs less meaning than a word that means “a look shared by two people with each wishing …” and it goes on and on. But how can that be? Does that mean “cat” is an atomic part of meaning? That can’t be so, because you can split the meaning of “cat” into many different parts — all the properties of a cat that make a cat a cat and not something else are part of the meaning of the word “cat”, as are all the cultural connotations that arise in all the contexts that the word is used. A cat walks on four legs. It’s small, unless we’re using it more generally such as when a lion is described as basically “a big cat”. It’s a mammal — but if you’re into wacky hypotheticals, I’d say that if the DNA of a cat wasn’t mammalian in nature, if it was discovered that cats of were the only creatures on Earth whose genetic ancestry is extraterrestrial, but otherwise, cats are exactly like we imagine them, then I’d wager we’d still be calling them cats, so although cats are mammals and talking about a cat implies talking about a mammal, “cat” doesn’t necessarily mean “a mammal”. In short, there are all sorts of things that complicate any given word and makes it really hard to tease apart the “semantic building blocks” that make up the word’s meaning. And assuming you can give a clear definition of a cat that contains only other semantic concepts, then you can repeat the procedure with those semantic concepts, mapping their semantic building blocks in turn, and I can’t imagine you’d ever hit bottom and find that elusive indivisible building block of meaning, the semantic atom. (“Atom”, of course, being a word that illustrates how the meaning of a word can change based on scientific discoveries; the word meant “indivisible” and was supposed to be the most fundamental building block of nature, impossible to split apart into smaller constituents, and then we discovered they must consist of electrons and neutrons and protons and can be divided — atoms aren’t atomic.)
Maybe proving that “cat” is a more semantically fundamental or primitive is too much trouble. Maybe instead we could use succinctness to mean specificity. If cat is a more general concept than mamihlapinatapai, maybe that proves that mamihlapinatapai is a more succinct word. But if you want to define general versus specific concepts in terms of building blocks, you’re back to looking for semantic atoms. Maybe a better way to gauge the specificity of a word is to look at its extension: to be precise, the size of the set of all things that match the word. So maybe if the concept “cat” refers to includes more things than the concept “mamihlapinatapai” does, that means mamihlapinatapai is more succinct. Then you can argue that “cat” means simply a cat, but “mamihlapinatapai” means a look, but not just any look, it means a look shared by two people each of whom wish the other would initiate … and so on, which appears to be very specific. But then, a cat isn’t easy to define, either. It’s an animal, but not just any animal; it’s a mammal, but not just any mammal; and, as I suggested above, maybe saying it’s a mammal isn’t really part of the essential meaning (whatever that means) of “cat”, and in that case, what precisely are the defining characteristics of a cat? Should you find some defining characteristics of a cat, you could then start picking them apart by trying to find defining characteristics of the defining characteristics, and so on, ad nauseam. This looking at the extension idea might very well boil down to counting off each and every thing in the extension, but that means precisely defining the extension of a word, which is a thorny issue for all the reasons we’ve already encountered. Not to mention defining “thing”: do fictional cats count? Do fictional looks shared by two people with each wishing … and so on? What about metaphorical uses? Contextual connotations?
This way of measuring specificity is also rather arbitrary. If every cat on the planet died except one, and no one had ever thought about fictional cats, and so on, so that there was truly only one single thing (however defined) that falls within the extension of “cat”, while at the same time there are several mamihlapinatapais in any given moment, does that mean that cat is a more specific word, and hence more succinct? Does the “amount of meaning” in a word depend on the very contingent and seemingly arbitrary size of its extension at any given moment (or even as an average over time)?
Given all these complications, I think it’s fair to say that consistently and unambiguously measuring meaning is extremely hard, if it’s even possible. Maybe measuring the amount of meaning in any given word or text is a category error: maybe meaning is simply a fundamentally unquantifiable concept that it would be a mistake to even attempt to measure. This highlights what happens when you start to get rigorous about language and meaning: all sorts of things that seem to be very solid and well-anchored get really, really slippery. Whenever you think you’ve caught the definition of some kind of fundamental concept, like “meaning” or even “concept”, it finds a way to complicate matters. Language just wasn’t made for rigour. I find questions of semantics, of organizing the world into concepts and finding relationships between them, to be extremely interesting, but also frustrating, because everything’s so damn slippery. Granting all the above, though, when I wrote, in the first paragraph of this post, that you could “create a word that has an absolutely insane amount of information in it”, I’m sure everyone understood perfectly well what I meant. But if pinning down how much semantic information (or “how much meaning”) is in a word is so damn hard, it’s a mystery how we can really understand the above so well.
That reminds me of the Paradox of the Heap, which is this: how many grains of sand does it take to make a heap? The question has no definite answer. A heap is simply something we recognize when we see it (or don’t, as the case may be). And I’m starting to think that the most fundamental concepts that we use to discuss and define other concepts and meanings are all this way: indefinable and yet understandable. Hell, at this point I’m not even sure if “the most fundamental concepts” is something that makes sense to speak of, even if we seem to understand what it means. To borrow (again) a quote from Quine, maybe these are questions that are “paradoxically meaningless — ‘paradoxically’ because of the vividness of their apparent meaning”.
Another philosophical question is whether there can be such a thing as apparent meaning. If people all have pretty much the same idea — leaving aside issues over how to define “pretty much the same idea” — when they hear a string of words, doesn’t that mean the string of words has a meaning, namely, whatever idea people get in their heads when they hear or read it? Perhaps it should be noted that Quine probably is using a more technical definition of “meaningless”, where things that have no definite truth values, like “what time is it?” or “ouch”, are “meaningless”, even if they do have a meaning. Not even I would say that only 1+1=2 and other definite statements are meaningful, while the rest of communication, which is almost all of it, has no meaning at all. I do believe that communication is meaningful, even if it’s hard to define the concepts used, and even if I am at this point confused about what “meaning” even means.
Oct 30, 2009
Newton’s laws of motion, from a 1729 translation of the Principia.
Oct 30, 2009
Word-o-Matic
Make your own Markov Chain generator. Like Norse gods or organic compounds. It works better if you have lots of words. I made one that generates names of Tumblr staff members, but there are too few names to really create anything interesting: it keeps cycling between some, like “Armentain”, “Davidani”, “Marcob”, “Chrice”, “Jaco”, and the input names, unaltered. Tumblr simply has too few employees with too few syllables in their names to make anything interesting. It was the first thing that came to my mind, but I’m sure you can think of something better. Like Biblical names, dinosaurs or US states (my third try, I got “Alas”).
Oct 30, 2009
Sup, dawg?
Oct 29, 2009
I wish more people were doing stuff like this:
Guest post on Jason Santa Maria’s blog.
Post on Dustin Curtis’s blog.
Article in The Bold Italic.
One of the great things about magazines is that all the articles don’t look alike. They’re free to expand, subtract, multiply, divide, paint, rotate, spin, glare, surprise and amuse, not only in content but also in form. This is lost on almost all blogs, because every post is forced into the same template. I mean, look at this! Posts about steam engines fucking, T-rex coins, photographs of bizarre medical equipment and existential despair all look the same! Everything’s sterile. There’s no variety. Hopefully the content isn’t boring, but the presentation sure is. And even the most beautiful template is, finally, only a template. You tire of it when you’ve seen it a hundred times. This is why stuff like Jason Santa Maria’s and Dustin Curtis’s sites is so great. There’s effort behind the presentation of each piece, and it looks great. That’s one thing you could say about GeoCities: subpages usually didn’t look like carbon copies of each other. These blogs are that, only with taste and skill and a sense of aesthetics. That’s great.
Oct 29, 2009
Medical Apparatus (!), by Kirill Kuletski. From a series of photos taken in the salt therapy clinic in Solotvyno, Ukraine, which is interesting in itself:
The therapy which takes place at Solotvyno is based on a method known as Speleo- therapy, an alternative therapy for asthma and other respiratory diseases. This therapy was discovered in Poland in the 1950s when it was noticed that salt mine workers rarely suffered from tuberculosis. Scientists found that the salt-permeated air of the working salt mine helped to dissolve phlegm in the bronchial tubes and also killed the micro-organisms which caused infections – and that this greatly helped patients who were undertaking treatment for asthma.
The clinic at Solotvyno salt mine is unique because its tunnels, which are 300 metres below ground level and remain at a steady 22°C (72°F) all year round, are the deepest in the world to be used for such purposes.
Oct 29, 2009
“Sometimes I pretend to be Neptune.” Wonderful. The death of Marat, by Kate Beaton.
Oct 28, 2009
The above is a very snappy graphic floating around the web that supposedly illustrates why net neutrality is a big deal. It delivers its message effectively. It will leave people properly horrified. It’s also a boogey man that doesn’t reflect the real dangers of a world without net neutrality.
Yes, in the extreme, without net neutrality, ISPs could offer internet access modeled on cable tv: you pay for the “channels” (websites) you want to see. But this isn’t going to happen. People are too used to how the web works. No one would buy the above plan. ISPs aren’t stupid. They aren’t going to make a move that separates them from ninety nine percent of their customers. The above will never be the norm, for perfectly obvious commercial reasons.
The real danger with the lack of network neutrality is the idea that packets aren’t created equal. ISPs will never blatantly censor every website except for a few hundred that you paid for — that would simply make no business sense at all. But what they might do is a lot sneakier: they might subtly change the internet under us. By prioritizing packets from certain servers or to certain places, the openness and competetiveness that we all know and love on the internet could be destroyed. If YouTube videos suddenly load twice as fast as videos from every other video site, everyone else is at a tremendous competitive disadvantage. Suddenly it isn’t enough to create a superior service to eat market share from one of the big players; suddenly you need to bribe the ISPs to get your packets equal priority, because there’s no way anyone is going to use your web service when the big players are loading twice as fast or half your packets are lost. The low barrier to entry on the internet would be gone. The openness of the internet would vanish. Competition between websites would be reduced. And yes, it might very well be that your ISP decides that packets containing criticism aimed at them should be downprioritized and ones that praise them should be given the deluxe treatment.
A better analogy than the “channel plan” above might be a bunch of mobsters who demand protection money. If the internet is a street, then the mob will hamper those stores (websites) that don’t pay, while favorizing the big players who can afford to pay huge sums in protection money. A small mom-and-pop store isn’t going to have much of a chance at competition, despite better pricing or superior products, if the store keeps getting break-ins, fires, muscle types skulking at customers, or if customers who shop at the store keep getting mugged so that on average, only half of what is bought there ever makes it to the customer’s home. Those chain stores are going to look mighty tempting in that scenario. Internet packets are the same way.
Or perhaps someone invents an entirely new use of the internet, but the ISPs put the technology at such a disadvantage that it never sees widespread adoption. Google, which is championing net neutrality — though China continues to be a blemish on their reputation for opennness — thinks that prioritizing the type of data contained in a packet is ok. While this is less severe than the mob-like system above — video might get priority over text, but not YouTube over Hulu — it does mean that entirely novel uses of the internet that we can’t even imagine at the moment could be at a disadvantage.
These, I think, are the things that could realistically happen in the near future. They might not happen, but so long as there’s no legislation that prevents it, they could, and whatever is potentially profitable will probably come to pass at one point or another.
Oct 28, 2009
Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more than four hours.Louis Menand. (via 3qd)
Oct 28, 2009
Darwin Among the Machines (1863)
We regret deeply that our knowledge both of natural history and of machinery is too small to enable us to undertake the gigantic task of classifying machines into the genera and sub-genera, species, varieties and sub-varieties, and so forth, of tracing the connecting links between machines of widely different characters, of pointing out how subservience to the use of man has played that part among machines which natural selection has performed in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, of pointing out rudimentary organs which exist in some few machines, feebly developed and perfectly useless, yet serving to mark descent from some ancestral type which has either perished or been modified into some new phase of mechanical existence. We can only point out this field for investigation; it must be followed by others whose education and talents have been of a much higher order than any which we can lay claim to. (…)
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.
Many have written about machines overtaking humans, What’s curious about this articel by Samuel Butler, from 1863, is how literally it takes the metaphor of machines as life. The lever is compared to the primordial cell from which organic life developed; “the mechanical kingdom” is contrasted with “the animal and vegetable kingdom”, there are mentions of “rudimentary organs” of machines, “perfectly useless, yet serving to mark descent from some ancestral type” — “the little protuberance at the bottom of the bowl of our tobacco pipe”, say. In other words, at the current rate of development, machine life will simply evolve. It won’t be the result of deliberate efforts to create machine life, it’s simply the inevitable consequence of the explosive rate with which we advance mechanical technology. We are busy building our heirs to the throne of Earth as we speak. The potential for steampunk porn is staggering:
Each race is dependent upon the other for innumerable benefits, and, until the reproductive organs of the machines have been developed in a manner which we are hardly yet able to conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for even the continuance of their species. It is true that these organs may be ultimately developed, inasmuch as man’s interest lies in that direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is true that machinery is even at this present time employed in begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony appear to be very remote, and indeed can hardly be realised by our feeble and imperfect imagination.
Steam engines copulating! (Remember how literally this entire article treats the analogy between organic and mechanical “life”.)
Finally, echoes of the modern world:
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.
Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.
Oct 26, 2009
Always remember to close all parentheses. We’re not paying to air condition the entire paragraph.Fake AP Stylebook.
Oct 26, 2009
Super Osama Bin Laden Kulfa Balls, Pakistani milk and coconut-flavored candy. Image from here.
Oct 26, 2009
Anon is Dead (1926)
I’m not sure if it’s uplifting or depressing to discover that people in the 1920s were concerned about the same things you are. It could mean that this is an eternal problem, which is sad, because presumably it’s hard if not impossible to solve a problem where generations have failed; alternatively, it could mean that someone worked out the solutions to these problems before, and we just need to dig them up, tweak them slightly and apply them to ourselves and we’ll be out of the hole we’re in presto.
Henry Seidel Canby declared that Anon was dead in 1926. Anon is equally dead in 2009. (No, a bunch of people wearing masks they bought in a store briefly gathering to be part of something that will be posted on the internet for millions to see and thereby gaining a piece of an infamous group identity does not count as “Anon”, even if said group identity totes that name.) Canby notes that many of the greatest works in the history of literature were composed or published anonymously, and “the raciest writing was often over his” — Anon’s — “signature, and if the great ones of the social or political world condescended to literature, he was their representative.” But now, “Anon, alas, is dead.” He remains dead today.
Canby sees the death of Anon as a symptom of the loneliness and anonymity of contemporary life. We crave to be seen, to be recognized, but modern life does not provide us with the identity and recognition we need. Hence the ego, a symptom of unsatisfied craving for recognition: we long to see our names in print as writers, as readers we long to hear a personalized voice talk to us, and as consumers we long to see a famous name recommend a product to us personally. “Watch the girl swaying at the strap in the subway crowd, a mere fibre of the impersonal mass, and see how eagerly she sinks herself in the blazing personalities of the paper she holds, in which everything from the fashions in stockings to international news is told by a Tom, Dick, Harry or Ann speaking intimately, familarly to her.”
Canby doesn’t see people as more vain or immoral than before. Rather, we are simply humans acting like we’ve always done and with the same needs and desires as we’ve always had, it’s just that modern society is structured in such a way as to deprive us of the satisfaction our egos got from the closer-knit communities of yore. This sends us desperately scrambling to somehow gain this recognition elsewhere, resulting in a vulgar “look at me” society:
It may be vulgar, but this glorification of the capital I is not explained by calling it vulgarity. What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life, and the prime cause is not the vanity of our writers but the craving—I had almost said the terror—of the general man who feels his personality sinking lower and lower into a whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization.
Indeed the language we use to structure our understanding of reality seems itself lonely:
Furthermore, this rush of the anonymous ego to take refuge in rich, glaring personalities that write of the world as if it were still intimate, is an escape from science which has pervaded education with a consciousness of abstract, immutable physical laws that take no account whatever of wish and ignore individuality completely. How lonely is the very sound of words like force, atom, ion, degeneration, subconsciousness, behaviorism! No wonder that we who live in a civilization made by science should desire its opposite.
Not only is Anon dead outside the text, as the Author whose name is on the byline, but within the text he’s nowhere to be found, either. Fiction has become autobiograhy, and much new fiction is autobiographical to such an extent that it’s not really fiction, it’s just material for fiction dressed up as fiction.
“Know me”, says the critic, “hear what I think, see how I am moved, and you will become inevitably a person of taste.”
Anon had to give his reasons, for otherwise no one would believe him. His opinions were no good unless he could back them up. Now that he is dead, emotion does seem to be taking the place of reason, opinion is driving out principle, and impressionism has made off with the art and science of criticism, taking the garage with the car. It is all very jolly and very good for the lonely atoms that were beginning to believe that there was nothing intimate left for them outside their own ego, but must we all be given a celebrity’s private emotions every time we ask for criticial nourishment?
The passion for nonanonymity is not likely to descrease. As clothes, food, transportation, language and emotion become increasingly standardized, inhibitions begin to enfeeble the ego. It becomes actually more difficult to think and feel personally, to be a husband, a citizen, a servant, a soul in an individual sense. Formulas exist for everything, even for an expression of gratitude, a laugh, a scream, a faint. We live in such formulas. Eccentricity is notably decling, especially in America, and eccentricity is one of the indices of personality. All the more will the colorless seek color, the conventionalized mind crave spontaneity, the anonymous and impersonal desire a vicarious indulgence in egoism. Novels are already biography to an extent never reached before. Novels have always been made up very largely from the personal experience of the writer transmuted into typical adventure, but the modern novel of the familiar kind depends to a dangerous extent upon trivial happenings which gain their only significance from the ordinary but very personal individual who experiences them. Taking a bath, hugging a sweetheart, dictating to a stenographer, getting drunk—all these things are described with what the author thinks is realism, but which actually provides only the same satisfaction of egoism as may be had from looking at the pictures of familiar individuals in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday supplements.
The art of fiction may have gained access to the inner recesses of the personality hitherto kept private, but it has lost its detachment and its sense of the really significant. As Henry James said of the disease in the mild form which he studied, in his notes on the modern novel, what we have in many new novelists is more often material for fiction than fiction itself.
All of which I agree with. The essay ends with the following:
Personality is now at a premium and the personal touch is a necessity for crowd-weary men. There is no need to resurrect Anon, but Ego should take some reducing exercises before we weary of his grossness.
Oct 25, 2009
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto
School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
Wow.
I’m not going to argue, because I love learning, but schools over the years have made a concerted effort to kill that love affair. Reforming or replacing schools is a daunting prospect, though. Some consider it absurd to even suggest large-scale reforms or even replacements for schools. But what we need is education — traditional schools are only one possible route there. The argument reminds me about the current wah-wah about the publishing industry: surely literature and journalism will die, since the publishing industry is dying. But school is just one way to get learning, and the publishing industry is just one way to get literature, and neither of them are a priori irreplaceable.
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Daily Meh is written and edited by Simen (contact me). It is, basically, about whatever interests me. Some things that have held my interest over time: philosophy, photography, logic, the internet, pop culture, not-at-all-popular culture, computer science, linguistics and speculative fiction. Among other things. You might also like to know that I live and go to school in a small town in Norway.
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