Balafon

Elon Musk recently commented on the global warming debate with comments along the eminently reasonable lines of:

If you ask a scientist if they’re sure that human activity is causing climate change, they should say no, because we can’t be sure. But if you ask them if we should continue pumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, they should also say no, because we’re essentially running an experiment whose end result we don’t know. So we should lean towards sustainable energy production and consumption. We don’t need to cause people immediate suffering in their economic lives, but we’ll need sustainable energy in the future, so why not start in that direction now?

Note the refreshing lack of alarmism.

Dude on Google+ commented with a list of links to why current models that predict global warming are deficient in several areas. This is actually orthogonal to the entire point Elon’s statement and my reaction to it.

Herewith my response (it’s been a slow morning and I had a little snark to burn off):

Dude, lighten up. If you had bothered to do a little googling instead of mindless knee-jerking, you’d realize that you are in fact preaching to the choir. I have read through the CRU source code, you know.

A few problems with your comment:

First, you have wilfully ignored the actual, you know, CONTENT of my post, viz: the perspicacious reader reader must infer that Svensmark et al. are just as Kuhnian-ly challenged as Briffa, Mann, et al. And most crucially, my statement that there is no pressing reason for immediate economic hardship does seem to have a TINY BIT OF RELEVANCE to the concept of “opportunity costs”. LEARN TO READ before you waste your own time and mine in mindlessly regurgitating talking points that don’t actually address what I wrote.

Second, burning hydrocarbons for power is STUPID, STUPID, STUPID even if there is no effect from atmospheric CO2, because they are far better employed as feedstock for plastics.

Third, burning hydrocarbons SMELL BAD and are a HEALTH HAZARD. Or have you never met anyone in your obviously sheltered existence with asthma?

Fourth, hydrocarbons are going to run out sometime in geological time anyway, so why not get in on the market early? If we as a civilization are ever going to level up on the Kardashev scale, hydrocarbons are just not going to cut it.

Fifth, you seem to have misapprehended a just slightly important bit of context: Elon Musk wants to LIVE ON MARS. Last I heard, there’s not a whole lot of oil on Mars. If you want to freeze on Titan just so you can have your precious hydrocarbons, go right ahead.

Sixth, living in a stinky blue cloud of 19th-century tech is JUST NOT VERY GEEKY. I’ll be exploring the solar system in my polywell runabout — fuelled by a bottle of water and a cup of Borax — while you’re dying choking on the vomitous excrescences of your Victorian explodey-machine.

Seventh, I am by political inclination a minarchist, and hydrocarbon power tends to incentivize natural monopoly and hierarchical control, whether by cartels, multinational corporations or increasingly overreaching governments. I am in favour of the devolution of all kinds of power, whether political or physical.

So to sum up, in the future, please try to hold yourself back with the small-minded knee-jerk reactions to people and topics you obviously have never actually bothered to actually, you know, INVESTIGATE. Instead, please try to decide on the actual MERITS of the PARTICULAR SITUATION, viz. a particular post by a particular person, as opposed to lapping up and regurgitating the context-less self-serving propaganda of your favoured political team.

Even if everyone you link to is actually correct — and as I note above, I am in fact inclined to think that they are — their conclusions ARE NOT THE SUM TOTAL OF ALL FACTORS. There’s a bigger picture, dude. Try to keep that in mind in the future.

Released NeuroLab 1.2.1: http://neurolab.bitbucket.org

Neurocognitive Linguistics is an approach to linguistics developed by Sydney Lamb (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lamb/) which uses relational networks to model what the brain actually does when it handles language. You can read more about it at the LangBrain site (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lngbrain/main.htm) and Glottopedia (http://www.glottopedia.de/index.php/Neurocognitive_linguistics).

Neurocognitive Linguistics Lab (“NeuroLab” for short) is a program for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux that allows you to experiment with relational networks using a convenient GUI, and record the results of your experiments in tabular form.

IronMeta version 2.1 has been released.

Version 2.1 contains some refactoring, miscellaneous bug fixes, as well as:

• Better error handling and reporting.
• Added IronMeta.Matcher.CharMatcher.Input() and IronMeta.Matcher.CharMatcher.Trimmed() for more convenient string handling.
• Added min/max repeats syntax (e.g. 'a' {1, 3}).

IronMeta is an implementation of Alessandro Warth’s OMeta metaprogramming system in C#. It provides a packrat parser generator that generates parsers for Parsing Expression Grammars that operate on arbitrary streams of objects.

The past couple of days have seen two unfortunate events, and two very curious reactions.

The events:

1. The Vancouver Canucks hockey team lost the Stanley Cup to the Boston Bruins in the seventh game of the final.
2. Some members of the crowd of people gathered in downtown Vancouver to watch the game engaged in violence and destruction of property afterwards.

The curious reactions (there were obviously many different reactions, but these are the ones that I find curious):

1. One person whose internet output I read uttered a vicious and vulgar condemnation of one particular member of the Canucks team. Another person said that the referees of the game allowed the Bruins’ style of skirting the edges of the permissible level of violence¹ in the sport to disrupt the Canucks’ “artistic” style of play and thus cost the team the final game.
2. The latter person also opined that the riots were the fault of the city government, who failed to provide enough police officers to quell the violence.

Both of these people are ministers of the Christian Church, one quite prominent on the national level.

I think the common element that I find deplorable about these reactions is that they utterly dehumanize the actors in question by depriving them of their status as independent moral agents with their own free will.

The first reaction is typical blameshifting to anyone other than one’s favourite, in a situation of cognitive dissonance where somone (in this case a sports team) whom you believe is the best at what they do is demonstrated to fail in this regard. The fault cannot be in the team as a whole, but must be either that of one renegade element, or else malevolent external forces.

The proof that this reaction in the case of the Canucks’ game is invalid is simple: the Canucks won three games of the series in the face of all the internal and external forces that were present in the 7th game, thus showing that it was entirely possible for them to win the series. The fact that they didn’t is simply a reflection of the fact that they failed to adapt their tactics or maintain their collective motivation: they didn’t play well enough to win. Last time I checked, a hockey game is not scored on “artistic merit”, but by putting pucks in the net. If you are so wedded to your style of play that you cannot change it when it obviously doesn’t work, then you don’t deserve to win.

To assign blame elsewhere actually does the Canucks a disservice. How does anyone become better at a given task? By first being worse. By honestly analyzing one’s failures and adapting one’s tactics appropriately. Claiming that the Canucks played as well as possible in this series is to deny them the chance to improve in the future.

The second reaction is, I think, similarly born of cognitive dissonance. Canucks fans/citizens of Vancouver obviously cannot be the type of people who would trash a downtown over a sporting event, so the fault must evidently lie in the government and the police.

This is far more serious than shifting the blame from your hockey team. It serves to completely deprive the rioters of their status as moral agents, and deprives them of both the opportunity and the responsibility to improve themselves. It’s analogous to saying a woman’s rape was inevitable because she didn’t wear the right clothes.

The blame for the riots rests entirely with those persons who chose of their own free will to commit violence, and no one else.

Saying “we need more police” is the answer of tyrants and oppressors. If you truly believe that state-sponsored violence is the best solution to private violence, then why not just go the whole way and use automatic weapons on the crowd instead of tear gas? I guarantee that this would quell the riot in a very short time, and act as a considerable deterrent to future rioters.

I think that the final and largest reaction to the riots is the correct one. Don’t deprive the rioters of their chance to improve themselves by ignoring their moral responsibility in favour of blaming the police. Don’t call on the government to “crack down” on public celebrations in the city. Rather, do as thousands of Vancouverites did yesterday. Show that you can get in the news by doing good and not evil. Go out and provide a praiseworthy counter-example by getting your own hands dirty cleaning up the streets, repairing the damage, and showing the world how to lose graciously, take personal responsibility, and show your support for your gallant defeated by acting nobly and building up, rather than tearing down, your community and society.

Eddie at Kouya provides a handy glossary of Bible translation terms:

• Meaning Based: “a translation which prioritizes the meaning rather than the form of the original language.”
• Form Based: “a translation which prioritizes the form of the original language rather than the meaning.”
• Literal Translation: “a form based translation”
• Word for Word: “a form-based translation and I don’t know much about languages.”
• Free Translation: “I don’t like this meaning based translation.”
• Paraphrase: “I really don’t like this meaning based translation.”
• Accurate: I like it.
• The Most Accurate: means either
  • as an opinion (I believe this is the most accurate translation) “I really like it.”
  • as a statement of fact (this is the most accurate translation) “I know nothing about translation theory or languages.”
• Dynamic Equivalence: “I read a blog post about translation once.”

I’ve demonstrated before that what you think is “word-for-word”, or even one that conforms to the grammatical structure of the source text (“formal”) is actually nothing like it, but let’s have another example.

From Anabasis by Xenophon we have this scene in a battle:

τὰ δ᾽ ἅρματα ἐφέροντο τὰ μὲν δι᾽ αὐτῶν τῶν πολεμίων, τὰ δὲ καὶ διὰ τῶν Ἑλλήνων κενὰ ἡνιόχων. οἱ δ᾽ ἐπεὶ προΐδοιεν, διίσταντο: ἔστι δ᾽ ὅστις καὶ κατελήφθη ὥσπερ ἐν ἱπποδρόμῳ ἐκπλαγείς: καὶ οὐδὲν μέντοι οὐδὲ τοῦτον παθεῖν ἔφασαν, οὐδ᾽ ἄλλος δὲ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἐν ταύτῃ τῇ μάχῃ ἔπαθεν οὐδεὶς οὐδέν, πλὴν ἐπὶ τῷ εὐωνύμῳ τοξευθῆναί τις ἐλέγετο.

Word for word, this is:

The and/but chariots they-went/were-driven the on-the-one-hand through of-their-own of-the of-enemies, the on-the-other-hand also through of-the of-Greeks without of-drivers. Those and/but when they-might-see, they-stood-apart: he-is and/but who also was-seized like in in-hippodrome panicked: and/but nothing indeed but-not/neither this-one to-suffer they-said, but-not/neither another and/but of-the of-Greeks in in-this in-the in-battle suffered no-one nothing, except on on-the on-right-wing was-shot someone it-was-said.

To make this even minimally comprehensible in English you need to make a lot of changes:

And the chariots drove some through the enemies’ own lines and some through the Greeks’ without drivers. And whenever they saw, they stood aside, but there was one who indeed was caught like someone panicked in a hippodrome, but indeed they said that he suffered nothing, nor did anyone else among the Greeks in this battle suffer anything, except on the right wing one was shot, it was said.

We had to re-order words, add words, change tenses, get rid of double negatives, and otherwise munge things to get even this clumsy text. And yet there’s a lot we still don’t have: who is the “they” in the second sentence? It becomes clearer with the context, but it’s not good English to have a pronoun refer to a referent in a possessive construction. What’s a hippodrome? I didn’t know they had guns in the 4th century BC…

Here’s Carleton L. Brownson’s translation:

As for the enemy’s chariots, some of them plunged through the lines of their own troops, others, however, through the Greek lines, but without charioteers. And whenever the Greeks saw them coming, they would open a gap for their passage; one fellow, to be sure, was caught, like a befuddled man on a race-course, yet it was said that even he was not hurt in the least, nor, for that matter, did any other single man among the Greeks get any hurt whatever in this battle, save that some one on the left wing was reported to have been hit by an arrow.

My favourite Bible translation in English is the Revised English Bible.