Hypocrites

So the news headline today is that one abortion doctor was gunned and killed while in church. If you check this article, a Kansas doctor was gunned down while serving as an usher in his church, due to the fact that he is one of the few doctors who perform late-term abortions in the country.

Now that is just plain hypocritical. It is also very Machiavellian. These anti-abortion advocates are against killing the unborn, but I suppose they are just fine with killing those who are alive and kicking. The end justifies the means.

I just am floored when I see politics and social dynamics here in the USA. What does one's abortion stance have to do with politics? Why does the fact that Sotomayor's abortion stance is not known disturbing and newsworthy?

I do not consider myself to be pro-life nor pro-choice. I suppose if there were a term for it, I would be pro-consequence. If you chose to have unprotected sex, and then get impregnated later, then face the consequences of taking care of the child. Life operates under a multitude of constraints. Having sex has a consequence, and that will always be in the equation. In that respect, I can see my views aligning with pro-life people.

That being said, I also believe in penalties. If a person goes on a killing spree and shoots 20 people, he should die. That is just another consequence. Again, there is a constraint: if one kills a person, then the person has to shoulder the consequences. If one is a serial killer, then why would the taxpayers shoulder his upkeep while he spend the rest of his life in prison?

Now this seems to be contradictory with the previous paragraph, no? Since after all, abortion doctors kill lives. So based on this reasoning, they should be put to death. Since we can in a certain level, equate abortion to murder.

However, if we look worldwide, murder is a crime. Every country considers that. But abortion, not really. There are places where abortion is legal. So is this decision based on the concept of sin? Or the concept of crime?

Anti-abortionists would sometimes use the argument "What if you were the one who were aborted?" But that is moot. Sure I am grateful that I am alive right now, but if I were aborted, how would I know? I would have been dead, so I would not have had the chance to feel sad or unhappy about it.

I suppose I value free will. But with free will comes consequences. Every human being has the free will to choose what he or she will do to one's body. Sometimes, there is a conflict of interest, like in the abortion debate. But this is still a debate, so choosing one over the other does not give other people the license to take the lives of others and commit a crime. I may not believe in the concept of sin, but I very much believe in the concept of crime.

Looking back on the killer and his actions, I suppose his actions still follow the constraint-satisfaction model. For him, one constraint became too powerful to ignore, and that is, he felt that he had to terminate the life of his enemy. He was just being selfish. But I suppose, he was too selfish that he forgot to put into the equation the consequences of taking the life of someone else.



(Red Object, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Book Review: Crime by Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh impressed me once, so I thought he would do it again. But somehow, he didn't.

So a year ago, perhaps, I cannot remember, I read one of his novels, entitled The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, and I liked that. And no, I haven't read Trainspotting before, but I am considering it.

So when I saw a new book by Irvine Welsh on the library shelf of newly acquired books, I picked this one up. Entitled Crime, this is a story about an Edinburgh police officer on holiday with his fiancee, in Miami. They were supposed to be planning their wedding, but somehow, Ray Lennox, the officer, gets entangled in a pedophile ring. The book basically is a story about how a Scottish police officer saves the day.

Now do I really have to read about that? I liked his other novel because it was literature. It dealt with a very interesting topic, with a very interesting "what-if" scenario. But this one? This book simply felt like it was CSI:Miami, in a book format. In some respects, this felt just like an airport novel.

In short, it was not profound. It didn't give me thoughts to ponder about. It didn't leave a lasting impression in my head. The only thing it gave me was a description of Miami and Southern Florida, which just added to my lack of desire to visit.

See my other book reviews here.



(Gargantuan Spider, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Unbelievable

Seriously? This is what the government officials do?

First comes the Chip Tsao comment, then the Alec Baldwin comment.

Back in March, Chip Tsao, a Hong Kong-based columnist, made a comment about the Philippines having no right to claim the Spratly Islands from China because "as a nation of servants, you don't flex your muscles at your master, from whom you earn most of your bread and butter." Due to that comment, the Philippine government declared him an undesirable alien and barred him from entering the country. This was also accompanied by a statement by a Philippine senator, denouncing this comment.

Then a couple of weeks ago, Alec Baldwin made a comment in the Late Show with David Letterman that he would want to get a Filipina mail-order bride, or a Russian one. Again, due to that comment, the Philippine government declared him an undesirable alien and barred him from entering the country as well. This was also accompanied by a statement, again from a Philippine senator, denouncing this comment.

Now let me get this straight. I do not agree with the comments that have been given by Chip Tsao and Alec Baldwin. I do understand that these are offensive comments and that the Philippine government has every right to bar these people from entering the country. What I do not understand are the reactions from the government officials, with the senators taking it their personal goal to denounce these statements. I do understand that they are defending the country, in fact, if one looks at Senator Pia Cayetano's statement against Chip Tsao here, she has a good point. There is nothing wrong with being an honest worker overseas.

However, there was a better answer that I wanted to see, and yet didn't.

Have these government officials ever wondered why the citizens of the Philippines go overseas to work? Why the Filipinos go to dire straits and arrange themselves to be wed overseas, just in exchange of money? It is because the grass is greener on the other side. And the government is not making it lucrative for people to stay. There aren't any jobs, and if there are jobs, it pays just a fraction of what is available overseas. Now why do these government officials waste their effort in denouncing offensive statements, when that is just a short-term solution to the problem? Why not provide a long-term solution and actually fix the country so that it will move forward, so that people don't have to advertise their bodies as mail-order brides in exchange of monetary security, so that people don't have to go overseas to work as domestic helpers, so that people don't have to go overseas to be laborers? That is a better solution than simply giving a threatening statement against these offensive comments. Because if the country indeed moves forward, then people don't have to go somewhere to thrive, and other people will see that our citizens aren't just worthy of being a servant or a mail-order bride.



(Weird Instrument, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 9: Recursion

So what is recursion? Recursion, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is the property of a certain rule in which the output of the rule can serve as input to the same rule. I suppose this is best illustrated by a formula. So, let's build a sentence. These are the following rules for building a sentence.

Sentence = NP + VP
Noun Phrase = (Det) + N
Verb Phrase = V + (NP)

Using the above rules, we can build the following sentences.

1. John slept.
2. John saw Mary.
3. The man slept.
4. The man saw the woman.

However, there are plenty of other sentences that are possible, at least in English. Let us add another rule or two.

Verb Phrase = V + (CP)
Complement Phrase = C + S

Using these rules, we can now build the following sentences.

5. John knew that Mary saw the woman.
6. The man thought that John knew the answer.
7. My sister knows that I know that she knows that I am a jerk.

Now, notice the application of the rules in a recursive fashion. The rule that generates a complement phrase gives a sentence as an output, which then allows one to generate a new sentence again, and again, and again. Here are other examples of recursion. For ease of exposition, I added brackets as necessary.

8. I saw [the dog that chased [the cat that killed [the mouse that ate the cheese]]].

I could go on and on and on with this, describing each noun with a modifier. However, not all recursions can be infinite. There are times in which having multiple embedded stuff can make processing difficult, and one such example is center-embedding, where the recursive material is inside the sentence, not at the edge. I will illustrate this one by one, for ease of interpretation.

9. The mouse ate the cheese.
10. The [mouse that the cat killed] ate the cheese.
11. The [mouse that [the cat that the dog chased] killed] ate the cheese.
12. The [mouse that [the cat that [the dog that the city impounded] chased] killed] ate the cheese.

Who here still understands what the last sentence means?

Anyway, some linguists, notably Noam Chomsky, argues that recursion is one of the most fundamental aspects of language, and by having recursion possible, one can generate an infinite number of sentences using just simple finite rules. Other linguists, however, such as Daniel Everett, challenges this view, using data from other languages such as Piraha, in which there apparently is no use of recursion. If this is the case, then recursion cannot be universal. Obviously, the debate is more complicated than how I outlined it here, and it is keeping linguists busy. In fact, linguists who find this aspect of language fascinating are having a conference right this moment, in UMass Amherst. We'll see how this plays out.



(Weird Contraption, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Unmotivated

Two days ago was a Sunday. The Sunday in a three-day weekend. It was a weird day, and I did totally nothing.

I wonder why I get these days sometime. Sometime, I just wake up, with the urge to sleep in, and grab some more extra hours of sleep. And that was what I exactly did yesterday, I just slept.

I had grandiose plans of cleaning the house, vacuuming the floor and polishing the bathroom, but it all did not happen. I just slept, sat down, and read my book. It was as if all the energy in my body left me.

Anyway, that is going to change now. I guess I just paid my sleep debts for the past week. And now, I am up, and I have work to do.

I suppose it would be interesting to see how the brain handles these motivational episodes. What is in the brain that fires that makes a person get up and do things? I suppose neuropsychologists have already figured this out. Say, you see a cake in front of you, what fires that sends the command to your limbs to reach out and grab it? And in a higher level, if you have certain tasks that you want to do for the day, what fires in your brain to tell your body to do it?



(Huge Chairs, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Atmospheric Shock

So summer is here. I am having hot flashes. I feel like I am a piece of Chinese dimsum being steamed in one of those bamboo circular dishes, where they put boiling water underneath so that the dimsum would be cooked.

So I looked online as to the temperature here. Apparently, the weather here ranges from about 18-23 degrees Celsius. That's about 65-73 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh no, that only means one thing: that I have been here for too long.

Why? Because when I looked at the temperature for Manila, it hovers around 33 Celsius or 90 Fahrenheit. That means that if I am complaining now, I would be in pain there. Bad, very bad.

I need to change perspective. I looked into the current temperature of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Whew! Good thing I am not there. For them, the high temperature hovers around 43 Celsius or 110 Fahrenheit, and the low temperatures are 31 Celsius or 88 Fahrenheit. Ok, I will shut up now. I love this summer, NOT!



(Jackson Pollack, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Book Review: Silver City by Li Rui

This is a case of hate that turned into like.

Rarely do I read Chinese novels, and there is a reason for that. Mainly, it is because the Chinese novels usually have a billion characters in them, and that these characters have Chinese names. And yes, even if they are orthographically different (Zhisheng is different from Ruide) but still, the unfamiliarity with the names, coupled with the quantity of them, makes me somehow lost.

But, most of the time, these novels, whose story spans multiple generations and families, have a genealogical chart to them, which aids in understanding the story.

So for this one, this is the story of two families in a certain city in China. The story is set between turn-of-the-century up to 1988, which spans at least four generations of the characters. It tells the story of the happenings between these two rich families and how they faded away slowly due to the Cultural Revolution.

So, like my previous experience with Mo Yan's Big Breasts and Wide Hips, the novel starts slow, because one gets used to the characters, but then moves faster and faster as the novel ends. The additional complication with this one however if the fact that the narrative isn't always chronological: and every chapter usually focuses on just one part of the family tree, because, even though things happen simultaneously in fiction, narration is linear: one can only talk about one thing at one time.

So yeah, I was impressed by this book. I didn't like to start it first: in fact, I had it in my shelf for 6 months, before I finally started it. But after reading it, I liked it, and now it is back in the library.

See my other book reviews here.



(Abstract Art, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

15 Books in 15 Minutes

So this is a tag courtesy of Final Transit. Apparently, the objective is to list fifteen books that will always stick on me. I suppose this will be a list of the fifteen books that have an impact on my being.

01. 1984 by George Orwell
02. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
03. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
04. The Cave by Jose Saramago
05. Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago
06. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
07. The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
08. The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Hwan
09. Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
10. Animal Farm by George Orwell
11. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
12. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
13. The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
14. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
15. Ulysses by James Joyce

I suppose there are a lot of ideological books in this list. Perhaps that is the way books make an impact in my head. If the book gives me a parallel world to which I can escape to whenever I want to, fine. Nothing is wrong with that. However, if the book gives me more than that, say, an idea, and if that idea makes sense, then all the better. And if this idea is an alternative idea from what the rest of the world believes, if it is backed up by reason, then I am more impressed.



(Carved Entities, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

To Switch or Nor to Switch

...to WordPress that is, and that is the question. I have asked this question before (for example, here and here), and I have gotten a few answers, but I suppose the threshold hasn't been crossed yet to fully warrant my attention. And just as a funny aside, it seems that whenever the topic of WordPress comes out here in my blog, Hamlet makes an entrance.

Anyway, let me apply my constraint satisfaction model to this issue. I suppose this is one way in which people can understand how I think, how I process things, how I make decisions.

There are two competing conclusions: staying in Blogger/Google, and switching to WordPress. Here are the following arguments for both.

Staying in Blogger/Google

• I can access my blog and post entries virtually anywhere: all I need is an Internet connection.
• There won't be any hardware/software problems: the server won't crash, and hosting is not a problem.
• I can make drafts and save them online: do you really think I upload those photos every day I write a blog entry?
• I do not have to pay for hosting: the only thing I pay for in the operation of this blog is the web domain, which I own for 3 years now.
• I can schedule entries to be published: I can write them beforehand and then just schedule the publishing process.
• I can edit previous blog posts, which are useful when I make reference pages, where I date them pretty far back and store links on them, like my book review page for example.
• I am already familiar with how the procedure works: I do not need to learn new code or other gadgets when publishing my blog entries.
• Comment moderation is a good thing: I have had no problems with them so far.
• Themes are easy to switch: there are now plenty of XML themes available on the Internet, and all one needs to do is to personalize them.

Switching to WordPress

• Apparently, everyone else is using them.
• Everyone thinks they are great, (but I don't know why).
• By switching to WordPress, one breaks free from the monopoly of Blogger/Google.

Okay, obviously, I am not motivated to make the switch. If I assign weights to the above opposing constraints, staying in Blogger/Google wins. Does WordPress do the same things that I appreciate in Blogger/Google? If so, then I need something more in order to make the switch. As Thomas Kuhn once said in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in order to induce a paradigm shift, one must show that not only is the new paradigm different from the old one, but also better. So, is WordPress really better than Blogger/Google? If it is, then I invite those who use it to enlighten me.

I suppose to start, let me pose a rather bizarre question: is there a difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com? Are they related? Why do I need to download it? Does that mean that I can only publish using my own machine? Who will be hosting my blog? Do I have to pay for hosting?

So yeah, those are just the little questions that I have with respect to WordPress. And so far, I am not convinced.

If I see that the benefits are indeed enormous, then I would see whether I would shift or not. I am not assuming that WordPress handle all the things that I want with a blog. WordPress may not be able to handle one or two of the things I enumerated above that Blogger/Google can handle, but if WordPress has other stuff that outweighs that deficiency, then I would consider it. It's all about weighing the constraints and seeing how all the weights add up. By the way, the arguments listed above in favor of Blogger/Google are listed in order of importance, the most important one for me (and therefore the one with highest weight) is mentioned first.

So, will there be a paradigm shift in this blog?



(Winged Woman, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Speak Up

The other day, I saw a student on the bus. She was weird. Well, the bus ferries students from the South Campus to the North Campus. Whenever I do not have a ride to school, I take the bus, because my apartment is near South Campus, but my office is in North Campus.

Anyway, the bus usually stops first at the main loop once it reaches the North Campus. However, the other day, it didn't. Instead of just driving straight from the entrance road, it turned right and first stopped at the on-campus apartment complex.

The girl, who happened to be a foreigner, became instantly worried. The back door opened, and she happened to be sitting right next to the back door. When the driver saw that nobody was getting off, he closed the back door, and then suddenly the girl stood up and headed for the back door.

What the heck? If she wanted to get out, she had ample time indicating that, and could have gotten out when the door was open. The driver did not see her and so the door remained closed. Then the bus proceeded to the main loop, where everyone, including her, got out of the bus.

I suppose what happened was that the bus did not do what the girl expected the bus to do, that is, to head to the main loop and drop off passengers. The girl became worried that she cannot get off at the proper location so she decided to save herself and try to get off prematurely.

Now the question is: is this a case of not being able to understand the language? I see things like these happen often. It's as if people are not confident of their actions, and most of the time, these are foreign students. They cannot make up their minds, so they act awkwardly.

Or maybe, it is just that they are not aware of the script and the routine that other people are aware of. Maybe, it is simply a correlation that they are foreigners that they are not aware of the routine procedure. Maybe, that is more the case so that when they spend time enough, they can know the routine and not act awkwardly.

But I suppose the thing that still bugs me is that people do not speak up whenever they think something is wrong. It's as if it is a fault to speak up and ask. Maybe it is the language barrier, I do not know, but I suppose the only way to overcome this is by actually taking the initiative to talk, and committing mistakes. Because mistakes aren't really painful. At most, they are embarrassing. But that is the only way people can learn fast, because they will remember.



(Nude Woman with Two Shadows, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Renovation

So, I changed things around here a bit. I suppose I haven't changed my blog theme for the longest time. It used to be that I changed my blog theme every six months. Blogger wasn't part of Google by then, and so it was very easy to change things around, especially since the XML themes weren't around yet.

Funny, because I remember having a lot of fancy stuff in the page. It used to be the case that I also had a music player on my blog. There would be an mp3 player that would initiate when one views this. Some people found that annoying, so I took it off. Besides, that looked a little over the top too.

Then, I found the Arctic mountain climbing theme. Somehow, that ended up as my blog theme for two years.

Oh well, Memoirs of a Linguist has been around for quite a while now. And Year 4 is about to be concluded in a few months, so I figured that it was time to change scenery.

So I looked around online for blog themes, but most of the stuff that I could find are girlish, with curls here and there, and it wasn't my type. But, I found this. It still follows the traveling theme, with a historical flare to it. So I suppose this would be my theme for the next year or so.

Enjoy.



(Whisper, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

The Dissertation Escape

So, I am planning a getaway.

I figured, I will be here in Buffalo for the whole summer, without going to any place because I will be working my ass off for this dissertation. I would need a break by the end.

However, there are some problems. First, I do not want to spend big money nowadays given the fact that I may be anticipating a move by the end of the year, given the fact that my funding is running out by the end of the year. I may move somewhere else, domestic, international, back to Manila, who knows. I don't want to deplete my savings for a rainy day.

Another hurdle is my visa situation. I still have legal student status until June 2010. However, my US student visa will expire by June 2009. That means that with the exception of Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean, if I exit the country, I need to renew my visa in order to re-enter. Now that would be a hassle, because I can only renew it outside the USA and ideally, I would be renewing it in Manila, but a flight to Manila isn't cheap.

That means that this getaway would be within the USA, and it will be cheap.

I have an idea. And I think it will work.

Well, I already have enough miles on American Airlines to cash a free one-way ticket. That means that all I need to buy is the return leg. Also, I will try hosteling for the first time. It will be cheaper than hotels, with dorm beds for just 25 USD per night. Besides, this way I get to meet new people from other places, after all, the purpose of this trip is a getaway, remember? I need to forget my dissertation, Buffalo, the university, my current friends, and just relax my brain.

So yeah, I think I can do it. This will be for one week, say, leaving on a Tuesday and coming back Tuesday the week after. Simple as that. As to the location, that's my little secret, for the time being.

By the way, I already got my Lonely Planet yesterday. Let the planning begin!



(Nude Man Wallpaper Edition, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Social Circles

I use the services of a social networking site. In this way, I can keep in touch with what goes on in the lives of the people I am friends with.

People move here and there, they settle down and then move away, and because of the flux, friendships sometimes get broken, perhaps abruptly, or slowly. That's why I suppose this is where the social networking sites come in, because in this way, there is a less degree of losing contact.

Two people from my past got married. One was a classmate of mine from 7th grade (before we left for Osaka in 1995) and another was a classmate in college. The 7th grade classmate got married to someone I don't know, and her bridesmaids were a bunch of my other classmates. It was nice seeing their photos, still stunning and gorgeous.

The other one who was a classmate back in college got married in Dubai, also to someone I don't know. It seemed that the marriage was simple but nice. I didn't know anybody in the pictures except for her, and if I hadn't noticed that she added a new surname, then I would not have guessed that she got married.

I have a good friend in which we both belong to each other's inner circles. We've talked about this before to each other, about leaving and the prospect of losing touch with each other. I suppose as much as people would try, people will come and go. I don't have contact with anyone in 1st grade (which was in Honolulu), I have very minimal contact with my classmates from 2nd to 6th grade (which was in Manila), I have contact through the social networking sites with my classmates from 7th grade (which was in a different school in Manila: my best friend back then just sent me a one-liner email as a response to my mass-post email). I don't have contact with anyone from my 8th and 9th grade class in Osaka, and the only contact I have with my 10th and 11th grade class in Osaka (which was in a different school) are three people: an aspiring documentary film director who is now based in Tokyo; a businessman with a Filipino girlfriend; and a Belgian former exchange student who is now working in London after getting a PhD in fluid mechanics, who also got married within the past year to a lovely Japanese lady. And no, I have no contacts with the people I went to school with in Guam as a 12th grade student. Finally, I still have few contacts from the people I went to college with. A few are living in Singapore, one is living in northern Japan, and I don't know about the others.

So I suppose when one is bored, nostalgic, and want to know what happened to the others, I go and view my friends' photos, and see where they are now. I didn't realize that one of my friends are now based in Bogota: I was really surprised at that. Another good friend of mine is now living in Geneva: the last time I saw her was in New York City 3 years ago.

Anyway, the world is an amazing place. I am glad that I was born in a modern society, and not in some other society, where the only world they know is the village they belong to. It is amusing to imagine what my life would have been if I were like that.

Oh well, if my friends were to be connected in a network, I wonder how it would look like.



(Nude Man, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Book Review: Lima Nights by Marie Arana

After finishing a not-so-enjoyable book, I picked this one up. I figured that since the last book I read was set in Russia, where all the scenery was cold, I decided to read this one, which was set in Lima.

So this book starts fast, and moves fast. Fast enough that I was able to finish it within three days. It tells the story of a 44-year-old man, Carlos Bluhm, a Peruvian of German descent, and his love affair with a 15-year-old chola, Juana Maria Fernandez. He meets her in a tango bar, and develops an affair with her. It puts a strain on Carlos' family, up to the point that her wife and children leave him.

Twenty years later, Carlos' wife is already dead, and his two sons are already grown-up and have a family of their own. Carlos is already in his sixties, and Maria is still not married to Carlos. Maria is desperate to get married, because she knew that she has no legal hold to Carlos, and also coupled with the fact that Maria is originally from the slums of Lima. She tries all things, including witchcraft, to make Carlos stay with her, but to no avail.

I suppose I won't put the ending here, because I don't want to break the suspense if people decide to read it. However, the thing I liked about this novel is the very vivid description of the city. I haven't been to Lima: my only knowledge of Lima stems from the fact that I planned on spending a day there when I visited Cuzco, but opted not to, since I was already tired, and so I just waited it out in the airport in Callao. However, from what I recall from studying the maps, the portrayal of the city was very accurate, including the good and bad neighborhoods.

I also like the way the two characters were developed, together with the supporting characters that go in and out of their lives. The demise of Carlos, from a very rational man, taking irrational life choices, and the ambitions of Maria, seeing that the only weapon she has is her sex, and how she tries to go up the social ladder.

However, the biggest thing that I liked about this book is the way it portrayed a relationship: as I was reading it, I felt like I was placed inside the head of these two people, as I was able to read their thought patterns and see how they act. For me, Carlos and Maria are the two most irrational characters in fiction, acting impulsively, consulting witchcraft and sorcery, not weighing the consequences of their actions. Their personalities were very opposite of mine. I found it fascinating to be put inside their heads and to vicariously experience how an irrational human being deals with things.

But, I still would not consider this one of the best books I have read. Yes, it painted a picture of the irrational side of humanity, namely, love and lust, but that's it. It's just like a soap opera turned into print. It was captivating, given the fact that I only read it in three days, but it wasn't profound. If one wants to read a novel to kill time in an airport, then this would be a good one. If one wants to read a novel to be transported to some exotic locale, then this is a good one. If one wants to read a novel to see how the irrational human being functions, then this is a good one. But if one wants to read a novel and be touched by it, then pick something else.

See my other book reviews here.



(Street Scene, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Wrecking Havoc

I suppose the summer has started. Perhaps, the weather is still cool and pleasant, but the spirit of summer is here.

For one, nobody is on campus. I rarely see people around, and most of the people around are not students, but just work staff. However, I still find myself on campus due to the fact that I find it more conducive to work on campus rather than at home. I suppose I have the resources that I need on campus, thus making life easier.

I have taken residence in the library's sofas recently. I find it more conducive to read books in the library, sitting relaxed on the sofa, rather than crouched in front of my desk in my office. I suppose it is because the office has my laptop in front, which can be a major distraction, while the sofa is more comfortable, specially if I need to read stuff for the dissertation. Just as an example, today, I read five chapters of a book on mental models. I felt like I needed to read it because I deal with them somehow, but it is not the main focus of the research I am doing.

People are already away. When I was in the lab meeting two days ago, there were people who weren't there, such as students who went back to their home countries for the summer. I on the other hand am fermenting here in campus, but I suppose this is a volitional decision, because I want to have this dissertation done and over with.

But who knows, I might get too sick of this, that I might go and disappear for a few days sometime in August.

Anyway, I have had a lot of books read by now, and after I read them, I scan them and save a PDF copy. My external hard drive is being used wisely.

So there, I suppose I need to go back to work. I'll be knocking off books from my shelf sooner than later.



(Little Girl, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Book Review: Pu-239 by Ken Kalfus

I suppose I have finally embraced the genre of the short story collection. In fact, I continually borrow books of this genre. Here is one other example of a short story collection that I read recently, and again, I am not so satisfied.

Pu-239 is a collection of short stories written by Ken Kalfus. The main arching theme of this collection is Russia. Even the fable Salt is centered around Russia, albeit a fantastic one. I got interested in this collection because I saw a movie preview of Pu-239 once, apparently, it is a movie, and it is about a Russian worker in a nuclear plant, and he is selling a container of plutonium before he dies.

Anyway, I suppose the main complaint I have with respect to this collection is that the stories lack some oomph. They do not deliver. The stories are flat, like the Russian taiga. The stories do not have suspense, they do not have thrill, and the turning of the page distilled into boredom for me, and it was the drive to finish the book and return it back to the library, not the drive to find out what was happening, which motivated me to continue on reading.

One of the stories was a fable, where it was about a country that had no salt, and then a certain character went ahead and delivered Russian salt to this country, and then the whole country got a good flavor to their dishes. I think that was precisely what this collection was lacking. It perhaps needed more salt, it needed more flavor, because otherwise, I would ask myself why I am reading about the life of a writer owning a dacha outside Moscow, if all that I read about is his mundane quotidian life story.

In short, I was not impressed.

See my other book reviews here.



(Self Portrait of Van Gogh, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 8: Iconicity

I haven't written any of my linguistic factoid entries recently, the last one being back in February. So I suppose I could write one for today.

And for today, the topic that I have chosen is iconicity.

Now what does this topic have to do with linguistics? The thing is, language is such as marvelous human faculty, and it lets us do many different things. It lets us ask questions, it lets us describe things, and it lets us command other humans. Language is a very interesting tool that us humans have, something that other beings such as animals don't, given the fact that they do not have the ability to do some higher level cognition.

Anyway, what does iconicity have to do with language? Well, iconicity refers to the fact that events are described in the order that they occurred. So, for example, if you ask a schoolgirl what happened in school, she would probably say the following.

I boarded the bus, then I saw my best friend, then we went to class, and the teacher showed us a very pretty book.

The order of the presentation of the events in the narrative roughly corresponds to the actual order of the events. However, that is not the only possible way of stating what happened. Different languages in fact have different ways of encoding events, and sometimes, the language allows us to encode events without following the actual order of occurrence. In English, for example, this language allows us to construct non-iconic discourse by making use of the pluperfect.

John got into an accident. He had been drinking heavily the night before.

In the above case, the drinking event was in fact temporally situated before the accident, but English allows us to construct a discourse where the event order does not match the presentational order of the events.

The curious thing is, not all languages do that. In fact, other scholars argue that there are some languages that only permit an iconic narration of events, one of those languages being Yucatec Mayan. This language happens to be a tenseless one, in the sense that the information as to whether an event occurred in the present or in the past is not encoded grammatically. In this language, narrations always take the order the events happened, and violations of this event order are not permitted.

From a processing point of view, it seems that iconic discourse is easier to understand. Several decades ago, psycholinguists have studied children in how they understand temporal connectives like before or after. It seems that very young children do not comprehend these connectives at all. If I remember correctly, it was Eve Clark who did experiments like these, where she asked very young children to act out certain scenarios, such as the following.

The boy picked up the teddy bear, before/after he patted the rabbit.

If I remember my bibliography right, she found out that very young children use an order-of-mention heuristic when performing the tasks. In other words, whatever action was mentioned first was understood to have happened first, without actually comprehending the meaning of the temporal connective. It is not until ages 4 or 5 that the full import of the temporal connectives are understood.

So there, I suppose one can make up a story why iconic discourse is easier to process than non-iconic discourse. In fact, it is this exact phenomenon that I as a researcher am interested in: what are the processing costs that comprehenders incur whenever they encounter non-iconic discourse? What are the factors that allow people to construct non-iconic discourse? To the extent that non-iconic discourse is possible within a language, how much of a violation is it in quantificational terms? Are there other factors that one can manipulate so that comprehenders would be more likely to expect a non-iconic discourse and therefore reduce the processing cost upon encountering one? If you are interested in this, you can contact me, and I can give you the correct bibliographic sources.



(Marble Garden, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

14 Hours

I slept for fourteen hours yesterday. I don’t know why, maybe I was just very very tired. I was just at home yesterday, I did a load of laundry, and then read a book. But maybe, I was very subliminally tired, so around 4 PM, I decided I read a book in bed. I became so tired so when I finished a chapter, I decided to go to sleep.

I woke up at around 10:30 PM, checked my watch, and realized that I have been sleeping since. I then went back to sleep.

Then I woke up at around 6:30 AM, this morning. Wow. I must be so tired, but it didn’t feel like it, since I didn’t do any strenuous activity before that. Maybe that was just sleep debt payment.

Anyway, I am back here in my office, working. I have turned in my dissertation proposal’s first draft, and my adviser told me that it wasn’t bad, but it needed improvement. Well, I figured that, but I just didn’t know how to improve it so I turned it in. But, it wasn’t bad for a first draft. So, we are meeting next week to improve it, for a couple of hours. Hopefully, the improvements would be to the right direction, so it can go to the rest of the committee members.

I am also designing some stimuli for two experiments: one for a collaborative effort, and another for some other collaborative effort.

I need to go to the store later today, to get some cleaning supplies and a new shower curtain liner. I am doing some spring cleaning, since my old roommate is moving out, and I want to clean the place thoroughly before taking in a new one. Chances of getting a new roommate goes higher if the place is clean. So I am replacing the old shoper curtain liner, and then bleaching the whole bathroom.

No news regarding funding issues, yet. I haven’t received any rejections, but I haven’t received any offers either. There are some other opportunities, but I am reluctant to apply for them at this moment, because it isn’t the most effective way of finishing a Ph.D., especially since it involves being away from Buffalo, and that it also means that my dissertation research would also be delayed. So if I can avoid that, then that would be the way to go.

I suppose I should end this post here. I think this is enough for a break.



(Black Sculpture, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

The Prime and Tangential Universe

So my friend and I watched a movie the other night, entitled Donnie Darko. It was a cult movie, and after watching it, I liked it a lot, although my friend did not like it.

It was very mind-bending, and it was a movie dealing with the topic of time-travel and the predestination paradox. Most time travel movies present itself as a romantic comedy, such as Kate and Leopold or adventure, such as Back to the Future. However, this one is different. This was rather more of a psychological thriller, because the pieces of the movie do not come together until the end.

Anyway, the movie is about a troubled teenager, Donnie Darko, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. It reminded me of the other movie that we watched before, The Butterfly Effect. Anyway, Donnie sleepwalks, and sees a six-foot tall doomsday-prophesying bunny rabbit. And at the first night, a jet engine crashes on to his room, but since he was sleep-walking, he survived.

The bunny rabbit told him that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 48 minutes, and 12 seconds. He then meets a girl, becomes her boyfriend, and vandalizes the school and burns a house. He also realizes that time travel is possible with a wormhole, and that he can correct the past if he does.

Anyway, it is hard to explain what really happened in the movie, given that the movie was a very mind-bending one anyway. However, somehow, the universe gets corrected, and Donnie dies in the end, when the clock reset to the beginning of the story.

Why am I fascinated with these time travel topics? For no reason, really, but because they provide fodder for gedanke experiments. Perhaps it also has something to do with my interest in temporal processing, on how people infer the temporal relations that hold across events in discourse.



(Naked Couple, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Dinner Party

Yesterday was a good day. I went to a dinner party hosted by one of my professors, since it's the end of the year and she wanted to host a party for all of her lab members.

Now the funny thing here was that we were academics, but the atmosphere was very different compared to when we were in the lab discussing language processing.

I learned that one of my professors has a sensitive soul. I learned that one of my other lab members experience emotional turbulence sometime. And I was able to give my adviser a big N400, and the other people noting it as the best face of the night so far.

I drank beer again, after a dry period of 7 months. I just didn't feel like drinking alcohol and enjoying it for the past 7 months. I had a bottle of Kirin Lager from Japan. And for once, I enjoyed it.

The Indian curry was great, with yoghurt and peanuts, coupled with a varied selection of chutney. I didn't realize that the professor I work with also cooks well.

So yeah, it was fun. The food was fun, the people were fun, the atmosphere was fun.

Now I need to go back to work.



(Lions, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Book Review: Julien Parme by Florian Zeller

Honestly, I do not know what to make of this novel. I was angered and discontented at the same time.

So apparently, this is a novel about the adventures of a young man, about 15 years old. He lives in Paris with his mother, his mother's boyfriend, and his mother's boyfriend's daughter. Apparently, his father is dead. And he is a delinquent.

The whole novel takes place as a flashback. The first chapter suggests that he is on a train, en route to a rather remote place in France, somewhere outside of Paris. And he hates going there, since there would be none of his friends in the destination, and he is going as a punishment for his delinquent behavior.

Then, the next 19 chapters, up to the very end, describe his weekend. It starts on a Friday night, where there is a party that he wanted to attend, but he did bad in school or something like that, that his mother forbade him to go. Then, he decides to get out of the house, and steal his mother's boyfriend's credit card along the way. He withdraws enough cash to take taxi rides, buy drinks, buy champagne, and other fun stuff.

Saturday, he meets the girl he likes. He punches her future step-sister's face hard enough that her nose is broken. And he buys a ticket to Rome.

I won't tell what happens on Sunday, because that would be giving away the whole story, but I suppose it is a novel that I am not too pleased.

On the one hand, the novel is about this adolescent who is too full of himself, I hated him. If he were one of my students, I would be so pissed, with him acting like he knew all the lessons one can learn from the world. On the other hand, the fact that I had this reaction to the novel suggested that the writer did a good job, because I actually got myself involved in the story. You know, there are books that make people cry, this book made me mad. So in that sense, the book was good.

I suppose this is a book about delinquency, which is something I do not understand. Of course, I haven't seen plenty of parent-child interactions when I was in Europe on vacation, but the little I saw involved a brat shouting to a parent.

Should I recommend this? For the content, possibly no. But for the writing style, definitely.

See my other book reviews here.



(Angelic Painting, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Alien

The remaining time for me here in Buffalo is slowly ebbing. At this point, I am projecting to be here until December 2009, and it is still not sure where I will be after that. However, the current uncertainty and fluidity of things made me assess who I am, and where I want to be.

Perhaps I have mentioned this before in this blog, but I am a third-culture kid. I was born in one country, and grew up somewhere else. Because of that, the cultural black box that I have is significantly different from those other people who are from my citizenship country.

I do not want to say that I regret growing up like this, since I would not want to change a single thing with respect to my past, but there are some things that make it mentally difficult. I am multicultural and acultural at the same time. Perhaps, the world just doesn't have a ready-made cultural label for people like me.

As an example, if you identify as a Filipino, there are certain cultural assumptions that other people can make of you, which can be true more times than not. Typical Filipinos place a high value on the family to the point of living together in one location even in multiple generations, they take certain beliefs as truth, they eat certain foods, they see things in a way that other people do not.

If you're an American, you would perhaps be a fan of football, you like pizza and wings, you would be so fascinated with sex during high school and alcohol during college, and your rites-of-passage would be the College Spring Break and a backpacking trip in Europe.

I don't have that. I don't have a brand. Not that I want to have a brand, by no means would I want one, but sometimes, it seems that things are easier if I were typical.

A few weeks ago, I thought about immigrating to Canada. This was due to my student status and visa situation here. I am currently here in the USA as a student, so I have to maintain student status in order to be here in this country legally. And there are so many hoops and hurdles that people have to go in order to say, stay here.

So I figured, what if I immigrate to Canada? I should have a job offer there first. Right now I don't have one, but I looked into Canada's citizenship and immigration services anyway, and it seems that based on my current qualifications, I pass the immigration requirements. I fluently speak English (although I am better at bastardizing French than understanding it), I have an advanced degree, and age-wise, I am good. If I remember correctly, I have more points than needed in the test.

Most people feel an attachment to their birth country. There are even people who would support their birth country regardless if it were right or wrong. I on the other hand think that my citizenship is simply random and the product of an accident, a glitch, a random chaotic blip in the universe. After all, one of my immediate family members carry a different citizenship than mine, and no, that was not the product of naturalization.

The difficult thing with being a third culture kid is that I cannot see myself settling down in one place. If one looks at my apartment, seriously, I only need two days to clear it and move: one day to pack, and another day to clean. I don't have any permanent fixtures. My furniture is minimal, and easy to haul. I feel like a turtle, always ready to go and leave town in the middle of the night if needed.

Emotionally, it is the same thing. I have a few friends, a few close friends. It used to be that I had less friends than now, but that was a different issue. Commitment is a big issue for me, since it always will be the case that I will look after my back, after all, I believe in two big tenets that drive humanity: mankind is inherent selfish, and mankind is inherently curious. Yes, I am selfish, I don't deny that. I find it hard to sacrifice, unless it is a person I really care about. Perhaps it is because we've moved around quite a lot, that nobody really was there to be relied upon. My family isn't close to other members of our extended family: I don't really know my cousins. So survival always meant protecting oneself, being selfish in that way. In short, it seemed that it was best not to plant my emotional roots deep in a certain place, after all, I'll find myself moving again in a few years. It's less pain that way.

I suppose, due to that, I feel like I can simultaneously belong everywhere and nowhere. I wonder what it would feel like living for a few years in Bogota or Helsinki, just to pick two locations as an example. I think that only a few people actually know who I really am, since I myself do not know who I really am.

Perhaps this is what drives me to spend time by myself in a foreign location. I suppose finding myself alone, with nobody I know around me, surrounded by people I haven't seen before, speaking a language I don't understand, is just a self-discovering process. I remember the day when I hired a taxi for a half-day in Cuzco, with his broken English and my broken Spanish. I also remember the day when I climbed Pisac, with a native guide, with the breath-taking view of the Peruvian Sacred Valley spread below me. It's a collection of emotional peaks that I don't even have words for.

Sometimes I fear that I have seen so many types of peoples and cultures, that I have become too open-minded. Perhaps a little too open-minded to feel. A little too open-minded to even know what I like and what I don't like. A little too open-minded to even know what my personal preferences are. Sometimes I am afraid I do not know how to attach a value judgment to something, since the first thing that I would think is that what I see is just a local practice, and I am the foreigner. I don't know, it seems sometimes that I forgot how to feel. I think I have become numb, to the point that I need to stand next to a cliff in Ecuador or Peru, just six inches from the edge, just to feel fear, to realize that I have cheated death in some way, and is fortunate to be alive still.

I don't know where my home is. Perhaps I'll spend the rest of my lifetime trying to find it, or I might just give up and just live with it, for pragmatics' sake. I often feel a restlessness to move and travel, which is somehow an effective way of detox. I am pragmatic and think that I won't go head over heels in this, but it's just a matter of self-control and mind over matter.



(Women and Baby, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Swirl, Kick, Smile

I was in the Indian joint earlier today, since I didn't bother to bring lunch. There was a TV in there, playing music videos of Indian music. It was a rather interesting experience, watching the music videos, and the reaction of the South Asian patrons while watching the videos.

So I was there, alone, sometimes seeing the videos, which are hilarious, if you ask me. Somehow, the Bollywood-inspired music videos were rather melodramatic, if you ask me, and they make use of plenty of colors, and the choreography is huge. There is always a couple, a male and female lead dancing around the set, and this huge collection of back-up dancers. And it seems that this formula works every time, because the numerous videos that I have seen while finishing my meal always adhered to this formula, and the other videos that I have seen other days also followed this.

It felt like a Chinese epic saga, with so many characters, as if the whole town was paid to be in a single video, dancing up and down, left and right.

Personally, it is not my type of music video. In fact, I rarely watch music videos, since I don't have a TV, so MTV is out of the question, and the only time I watch music videos are when I am curious about a certain music video and I search it in YouTube.

But it seems that the opinion of the patrons are different.

Almost all of the South Asian patrons of this Indian joint were glued to the screen. They would watch the music videos, as they eat, as they drink their soda, as they talk to each other. It somehow reminded me of the TV dinners back in the 1960s.

I suppose I find it interesting what different cultures find interesting and worth gluing their eyes to. I witnessed the same behavior when it comes to American guys and football.



(Erotic Picture No. 2, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Not Yet Over

So I haven't been blogging regularly for the past few days. That is because I am so overwhelmed with school work that I am always finding myself in the midst of business.

Anyway, my Psycholinguistics class was already over: I turned in my essay a few days earlier than the deadline. I also had a lab meeting last Friday, and it turned out that the project that me and another graduate student is working on will be the topic of the lab meeting two weeks from now. So I have to work on that.

The more immediate thing however is my dissertation proposal. I am turning in a first draft tomorrow. I am still unfinished, so what the heck am I doing writing this blog post! Well, I only have the final section unfinished: the introduction, why the study is significant, what the study is about, and the literature review are already done. I just have to outline what the experiments I want to do will be about.

After I finish that, I will have to work on my joint project, since it is an experiment that we are trying to run over the summer. This is an experiment that attempts to unravel the confounds of an experiment that a different group of people from a different university ran. It happens to be about relative clause processing, which is not my area, but the people who ran across it thinks that the results are muddled by temporal interpretation, which is my area. So we are joining forces together and seeing whether there indeed is an effect with respect to the factors that we are including. Hopefully, that can be a poster presentation for a future conference.

Aside from that, I also have another paper to write. This is the paper that I presented last February, and the organizers are doing a proceedings. So I need to write it up, within 12 pages, and submit it for publication. I have until May 15 to do that.

What else? I am looking for a new roommate. My current roommate will move out at the end of the month.

I am also looking for a job. I have a job until December, and obviously, I cannot finish a dissertation within 7 months. I am currently looking for other jobs on-campus that would give me not just a semester, but a full year's support, but if I don't get anything aside from the one I have right now, then I will use the whole remainder of 2009 to scour the world over for temporary jobs, so that I can live. I happened to mention that to my adviser, so he suggested that we have a little talk so I can set up my dissertation in a way that I can do the nitty-gritty stuff while I am still here.

Oh well, that is the reality of the future. The future is mostly a dark unknown blob, and I tend to make my future, not just wait for things to happen.



(Erotic Picture No. 1, from my National Gallery of Art Series)