Denglisch and my Delicious Back

Every now and then, I see signs on the streets, and sometimes, it would make me chuckle, simply because I know both English and German, and so there's linguistic intereference that sometimes creates weird meanings.

Google Wants Me to Cook Spam

Seriously, Google, out of all the things you want me to cook, you want me to cook with Spam?

Dr. Linguist-in-Waiting?

The other day, I opened my email, and in my inbox, here's what I found. It was quite a pleasant surprise.

Bed Intruder Song

This is a totally random post. After posting several entries that perhaps would cause the reader to pause and think and meditate, I figured I should post something that is just for laughs.

Well, with that mission in mind, check out this video from YouTube first.



This apparently was a news report in Huntsville, Alabama last month. Now, after that, watch this video.



There. Because of that, I subscribed to Auto-Tune the News by the Gregory Brothers. Nothing is better than a little laugh as a break when one is dissertating.



(Climbing with my Guide, from my Pisac Series)

Evolutionary Aspects of my Mobile Phone

I am heavily jet-lagged right now. I wake up at weird times of the night, and I cannot get back to sleep. Anyway, that is the reason why I think I am blogging and writing this entry right now.

So, as the title of this entry suggests, I am writing about my mobile phone. I just got a new unit this week, and I like it. It is a far departure from the very first mobile phone unit I had ten years ago.

So, my first introduction to the mobile phone was back in August 2001. This was when we got back from Guam, and I started college. The original plan was that everyone of us in the family would get the Nokia 3310, and so my sister and I got them. I had one of those units like the picture on the left. However, given my dad's propensity for being a techno-freak, this plan never happened, he got himself a swankier phone than us.

The Nokia 3310 was an interesting phone. It had interesting games, and I remember playing Snake quite a lot. The buttons were simple, and there's only a Select button, a Back button, an Up button, and a Down button, in addition to the alphanumeric keypad. That was it. Most people I know had this phone, and it came in various customizable cases. I remember seeing stalls in markets selling different cases for the 3310, so that you can have a phone that has various different designs and colors.

I used the Nokia 3310 for about two years. Then, somewhere down the line, my dad got a newer phone, and handed me down his old Nokia 8850. This is a mobile phone that is metallic in nature, and I believe the unit I had was even made of titanium. At the time, it was the upscale type of phone, even though come to think of it, its functionality was pretty much the same as the Nokia 3310. The screen was still monochrome, there aren't any e-mail functions, the ringtones are also monotone, unlike nowadays when one can have mp3 ringtones. I remember my friends liking this unit, remarking that this is a sign of my upscale taste.

I still played Snake here, but the keys are smaller than the Nokia 3310, so it became a little harder. I remember the keys just being the size of a rice grain. There's an extra button, which put the Address Book in a separate menu from the rest. I used this phone until I moved to the United States, in 2005.

When I arrived in the United States back in 2005, I didn't have a mobile phone for the first year. The thing is, I had email, and I found myself connected to the Internet for most of the time, or at least, access to the Internet was fairly often that if people needed to leave me a message, they could just shoot me an email and chances are I would get it within the day. Besides, my on-campus apartment back then had a landline, so I just bought a landline unit, and it came with a voicemail as well, so that was basically my phone.

However, I moved to an off-campus apartment after one year, and the apartment I had didn't have a landline, and I figured it was a hassle to have one installed, so I just bought a mobile phone. I wanted T-Mobile to be a provider: somehow, I had this idea that it would be good to get T-Mobile since my folks in Europe were using them too, and there wouldn't be lots of interface issues. So this time, I went to the mall, and got a Nokia 6010.

So, the Nokia 6010 is pretty much the same as my previous two mobile phones. The main difference is that the screen has colors now. It also allows you to make instant messages on various Internet platforms, but one still cannot surf the Internet. There are interesting new games, but aside from Bowling, which I got tired of after having a stagnant score streak, then I didn't make use of the games anymore. The ringtones have improved, they can now play multiple tones at the same time, but they aren't as good as mp3s still. This I think is the phone that I have used for the longest time, until just this past week. The only reason I have actually replaced this is because the unit has been acting up for quite a while now, and some of the buttons have been unresponsive by now. So I figured it is time to buy a new unit.

So we get to my fourth and current unit: the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic. This is a radical departure from my previous phone units. This is the first smartphone that I own, and so far, I am liking it. I am like, wow, I like this neoteric curio I have laid my hands on.

So, this phone is quad-band, which means that it can run on 850/900/1800/1900 frequencies. This means that I can use it pretty much anywhere in the planet, and all I have to do is insert a local SIM and that's it. The previous phones I had were rather locked to the provider, so I can't use it when I go overseas. This one has that flexibility.

Another thing I like about this phone is its multimedia capability. It is built to be a music and video player as well, and it is also equipped with a camera. Now here I am who says to people that if I want a camera, I would buy a camera, not a camera phone. I am more an advocate of division of labor, so my camera needs would be satisfied by a camera, my scheduling needs would be satisfied by a PDA, and so on. I typically do not prefer a device where everything is in there, yes, it is convenient, but also it is risky: if something happens to it, say, if it gets lost, stolen, or whatnot, then everything gets stolen. And that is more inconvenient than having multiple equipment. After all, I don't have the need to use all these functions at the same time.

However, I like this music player. I haven't had an iPod just to let people know, and I usually listen to music by means of the Internet using my laptop. But this time, things will possibly change, as the Nokia 5530 has mp3-playing capability. And I can have mp3 ringtones now!

What else? Oh, it also has wi-fi capability, which is something that the previous phones I had didn't have at all. I can thus surf the Internet using my unit, and that is sweet. It doesn't have any buttons at all, instead, data input is done by a touch screen, and there also is a stylus that helps in input. That is sweet.

So yeah, overall, I like this new phone of mine. Awesome stuff. I'll hang on to this for a good few years, and we'll see what the future holds for my next unit. But in the meantime, I won't think about that.



(Deadly Cliff, from my Moray Series)

Dogs, Buffalo, and Fish and Chips

Here is an exercise in language for you.

Figure out what the following three statements mean, and yes, they are all grammatical English sentences, apparently. Try not to cheat by searching the web for parses.

1) Dogs dogs dog dog dogs.

2) Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

3) The gaps between fish and and and and and chips are unequal.

4) James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.

Once you figure these out, then you will learn how valuable intonation and punctuation can be in disambiguating language.



(Palacio de Justicia, from my Bogotá, Colombia Series)

Stupidity, Whew!

So the latest season of The Amazing Race just concluded this past week. And I am glad that Brent and Caite did not win the race.

Well, between the two brother teams, I didn't have a preference. The cowboys were cool, and I like the fact that they were somehow always just breezing their way in the race. They were these two brothers who hasn't traveled around the world, and yet they get to do good on stuff that they normally won't do. I also didn't mind the other brother team, hey, there's something sappy about winning the race if that is your dream come true. And the fact that Dan actually hated traveling but did it just for his brother, that was kinda sweet.

But more importantly, I am glad that Brent and Caite did not win this race. That would have been really terrible.

I suppose it is because the cowboys were nice, and in this world, being nice doesn't always get you to where you want to go. I liked Dan and Jordan's tactic of requesting to be seated at first class when it mattered, although I have to say that there were times when I was thinking to myself that they should use their brains better, such as when they actually were powerless to find the Garden Bridge in Shanghai and waited for the next team to be released for help. They only won one leg for a first-place finish, and that was with the help of a Fast Forward, but when it mattered the most, they played the game well. The cowboys, I liked their game, but when it mattered the most, at the last leg of the game, they were too nice. They could easily have pushed Jordan away from the virtual-reality pad if they wanted to go forward.

Anyway, the thing that I am excited the most is the fact that Brent and Caite weren't the winners. After all, really, learn how to speak English first (I recommend starting with the proper use of the phrase such as). I could recall so many instances in which it was a dumb moment. Let me see what I can remember.

1) They didn't even know who Joan of Arc was. They thought it was the male character who took all those animals to the boat. Hey, that was Noah and his ark!

2) Brent doesn't seem to know the difference between unanimous and anonymous. The first word refers to a situation when everyone in a group has the same decision, while the second word refers to a situation where the identity of someone is not revealed. Learn your vocabulary.

3) They don't know geography well too. When they were in that one part in China that had plenty of canals, Brent was like, I feel like I am in Sicily. Really? Aren't you thinking of Venice instead? The last time I checked, Sicily is this rugged and mountainous island in the Mediterranean, while Venice has the intricate and famous canal system. I wouldn't want you to be my travel agent.

4) Don't think that you're smarter than the locals, just because they cannot understand you. Brent was giving directions to this cab driver, and obviously Brent does not speak Mandarin, so when he pronounces this place name and the driver doesn't understand, chances are it's because your pronunciation is weird, and not because the driver doesn't understand his own language.

So, I suppose the take-home message to this one is that before one goes racing the world, I suppose one needs to work on one's IQ first. Sorry, but I think this team's quest of proving the world their intelligence didn't pan out as well as they thought it would have.



(Botanical Garden, from my University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Series)

Men are Dumb

So the other day, I was in the supermarket. I was in the shampoo and body wash aisle, and I was there because I needed to replenish my supplies.

I realized that men can be dumb, and the way these supplies are marketed reflects that.

How?

Well, if you look at a random female-oriented body wash, for example, the bottle and the whole packaging highlights what exactly is in the product. So it has coconut oil, aloe vera, jujuba what not, pomegranate, you could actually make a freaking salad in there. Females apparently care about what is inside the product.

Not with men.

I noticed that these products that are geared for men, such as male body wash, and so forth, do not really describe what is inside. Men apparently don't care whether their body wash has aloe vera or pomegranate. Instead, they care about something else.

I noticed that these male products are bottled in a way that makes men think that they can attract women by simply using these products. Heck, this body wash has pheromones! Oh, by simply using this after shave, you can magnetize girls! Really? So no matter how ugly you are, just use this product and you will increase contact with the opposite sex.

Wow. And men fall for that? Apparently so, because if they don't, then this method of product placement would cease, but it still is being done, so obviously it is working.

Do men really think that women operate by just pheromones? That women will get attracted to you simply by smelling a certain product? That I suppose is a very animalistic view of humanity. And here I am thinking that we are higher level cognizant beings.



(Thomas Wolfe, from my University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Series)

Academic Culture Differences

Linguistics Departments usually are smaller than your typical college department. It isn't as big as English, or Chemistry, where there are several faculty members and not everybody knows everybody. At times, in smaller universities, linguists are not even in their own department, instead, they are affiliated with the English Department, the Romance Department, or what not.

My department is of a fair size, we have about 14 faculty members who are tenured or tenure-track. And yet, I still am amazed at the diversity of the academic interests within the department.

So, what I am about to say next is just pure observation, this is not based from any hard facts whatsoever. Who knows, I might be wrong at times.

Anyway, I see three camps in which the faculty members and the graduate students are aligned. There is the jungle camp, the lab camp, and the theory camp. And depending on where you are aligned, the things you do, even to the most minute things, such as how to cite people in your papers, will differ.

So, let's start with the theory camp. People from the theory camp gather their data without going to the jungle or to the lab. They theorize instead. In a way, they gather their data for free. Thus, this is the easiest camp to be in if it is data-gathering that we're talking about. However, these are also the most intense people, as they know their theories in and out, and they can manipulate them to the most painful degree. At times, however, one can wonder how it is relevant to the larger picture. But hey, someone has to do it.

Theory campers write papers usually by themselves. Collaboration is existent, but solo work is more prized. They use the citation manual as dictated by the Linguistic Society of America. This means that in the bibliography, one uses small caps.

Next is the jungle camp. People from the jungle camp usually disappear in the summer, sometimes, for even longer times. This is because they go to the jungle to gather data. They value fieldwork and interface well with anthropology. They document languages that are almost dying, and they describe languages that haven't been described before. Dissertations written by jungle campers usually are enormously long, averaging around 400 pages. This is due to the immense quantity of the appendix that is attached, which is basically almost all the data that have been collected in the jungle. They also are familiar with all the vaccines that one needs to go, so check their upper arms and there might be traces of shots of yellow fever, malaria, hepatitis, and other vaccines.

Jungle campers also have the tendency to publish solo. Mature jungle campers have published books of grammars of the languages that they have described, and usually they hang on to their jungle for the rest of their career. Sometimes, they go native by marrying one of the members of their population of interest.

Finally, there's the lab campers. I belong to this camp. Lab campers do not disappear in the summer, but they disappear for hours every day sometimes. This is because they have a cave in the campus, which is their lab. They usually care more about the data, not the person. They interact with hundreds and thousands of people just in order to measure weird things, such as how fast people read a certain word, or to know what the shape of a specific brain wave is given a word. Lab campers also like graphs and pictures, and are intimate with math and statistics. Sometimes, lab campers can over-generalize though and apply statistics to real-life, which may have disastrous results. And speaking of pictures, they like to take pictures of weird things, such as the inside of your head.

Publishing is different in lab campers. Collaboration is the norm, and papers usually have more than one author. Lab campers can be very picky at times when it comes to who gets to be the first author or not of a certain publication. It is not surprising to see a paper with four different authors. And lab campers use the citation manual provided by the American Psychological Association, which means that only the first letter of the first word in a title is capitalized, unless there is a colon in the title, and so forth. Dissertations by lab campers usually are short, averaging around 150 pages.

So, even though this is clearly satirical in nature, I hope I have demonstrated that Linguistics, even though it may be a small department compared to other departments in the university, is a very diverse field, and because of that, it can create tension in some cases, but I am happy to say that in my case here, we are one big happy bunch.



(Table Detail, from my University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Series)

Madness

So, I haven't been blogging lately. I know, I've been busy. I am two weeks away from defending my proposal, and so that takes most of my time. I have four committee members, and that is a little tricky. But, things are moving.

I also am part of the group that is instrumental in establishing a subject pool for my department. The thing is, it is hard to do research for people who do lab-based linguistics. I have connections with the Psychology Department, but one goal that I and a few other people that are in my department want to accomplish is to establish our very own subject pool. We have tried, and there are some teething issues, that we are trying to iron out.

Anyway, I don't think there's much to blog about, so I will just leave you all with a rather interesting comic, as shown above, taken from PhDComics.com which nicely illustrates what inter-disciplinary research is about. I have experienced this first-hand. One caveat, however, is that unlike the pessimistic tone that the comic has, I do know where I belong.



(Morehead Information Center, from my University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Series)

Parsing Miss South Carolina

I know this is three years late, but I only heard of this incident recently, when I started watching the current season of The Amazing Race. Apparently, one of the contestants is Caite Upton, who was Miss South Carolina Teen USA back in 2007.

And guess what? Apparently, she is infamous for making perhaps the longest non-sentential fragment ever recorded on national television.

So, back in the beauty pageant, she was asked why is it the case that one-fifth of Americans cannot locate the USA on a world map. Wow. Really? I never knew that was the case. So she answered the following, which is quoted verbatim:

"I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children".

Um, is that a sentence? A sentence should have a subject and a predicate, and the predicate should have a verb. But it turns out that this is not a sentence, but just one whole big fragment.



I found an attempt on a parse of this statement online, which is the one you can see above, and as you can see, this is not a full sentence. Enlarge the picture to see how it is parsed, and you can see that this is just a big fragment. I suppose this is what happens when you add pressure to syntax production.

Oh, and as a tangent, I suppose the reason why one-fifth of Americans don't even know where they are on a map is because it is unusual among the countries in the world where the fact that they have a status as a superpower fosters this cocoon-like existence. America is powerful, and therefore other people come to America because they need America. Heck, even I came here to get a better education. Americans who are here on the other hand have everything they need, so they don't need to get out and see what's out of their borders. If they need something, it will be delivered to them. They don't need to get out of their own backyard.



(Top View, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Amazing Americans

So I am a little behind from watching my favorite show on the planet, The Amazing Race. I just finally watched the first episode. I know, I am 3 weeks behind.

But anyway, upon seeing the first episode of the current season, I am reminded at why I like this show. Because it showcases the amazing characteristics of various things.

First, the excitement. I always get excited at the thought of travel. There are these 11 teams, starting from Los Angeles, and they find out that they are heading to Santiago de Chile. Wow. To fly like that halfway around the planet into a different hemisphere, I suppose the excitement in flying will always be with me, no matter how often I do the route. It just has something to do with experiencing something that is not in the ordinary. Heck, I am flying back to Manila in a couple of months, and I am getting excited, partly because this is the first time I am flying via Alaska!

Second, the amazing stupidity of some Americans. I always enjoy seeing the faux pas and the blunders of the contestants. So, one contestant apparently was in a beauty pageant, and she was asked why 20 percent of Americans cannot even point where in a globe the United States is, and her answer was so idiotic. Wow. Another team figured that since they were going to Chile, they needed to change money, but they changed it to Brazilian money, not Chilean! Another team decided to just barge in a house and trespass and paint a wall when they were instructed to paint an outside wall, thus not following directions. What were these people thinking? It seems that their brains are turned off. It's as if they don't realize that there is a whole world outside their backyard!

In a way, I find it almost offensive that some people assume that the things they take as normal should also hold for a foreign country. Assuming that American dollars would be valid for Chile, assuming that Andale! Andale! would be comprehensible in Chile, assuming that things would always be the same in a foreign country, when the correct assumption to make is that things would be by default different in a foreign country. I find it difficult to grasp why people, Americans especially, make that assumption. When I travel to a foreign country, I know that that country would have its own currency, I know that that country would have a language of its own, and in fact, I would be surprised that my norm actually holds in a foreign country, such as when I first learned that Ecuador uses the American dollar as its own currency!

In any case, I love this show. I love the sights, and it gives me ideas on where to head to next when I find the time to traipse the world yet again.



(The Well, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Alphabet Dance

The other day, I was in the lab, since I had to be there to do my two-hours weekly duties, running experiments on participants. However, while I was there, there were other things to be done, such as alphabetizing a huge stack of old Informed Consent forms.

There were two folders of old Informed Consent forms. Whenever a participant comes in, we go over the legal aspects of research, and they have to sign an Informed Consent form, in duplicate. One goes with us, the other goes to them. And since this is a big lab with participants coming every day for the whole semester, it accumulates quite fast.

It was funny alphabetizing them. There were post-it notes everywhere in the lab, from the letters A to Z. Three people were there, doing this musical chairs dance, having a pile of papers on their hands and just dumping the papers on the relevant stacks. It was quite an interesting feat, sort of a work out actually, since we were moving all over the room arranging the papers in the different stacks. And once we were done, then they would go in a neat alphabetical pile.

I don't know why, but I found that a little fun. It was different from what we were usually doing, so I didn't mind it at all.

Oh, and some good news. This is the last photograph from my Hirschhorn Museum Series.



(Burghers of Calais, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

9 Degrees

So, after that nice warm weather that we had, right now, we have extreme cold. Currently, it is 9 degrees Fahrenheit. Yep, you read that right, 9 degrees. I think it is a double digit negative number if that were in Celsius.

So, if you're in California, do not even bitch about how cold it is there right now, because unless you come to Buffalo and deal with the snow, you do not know what cold is. You would not know cold until you feel that you were injected with cryogenic fluid as a bone marrow transplant.

Anyway, in unrelated yet happier news, I was able to load a new experiment into the lab, and therefore I started posting fliers all over campus again. And yes, people started signing up yet again, and we are starting to run the experiment starting next week. That way, hopefully, we get to have another publication into press.

Oh well, it's the third week, and things have started to pick up. I just graded my first quiz, and I am back into my other lab, running subjects yet again. And guess what? A few more days and it's already February!



(Mechanical Globe, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Back to Regular Cold Programming

January is such a bizarre month. It is basically, unpredictable. How so?

Well, this past week, we had such wonderful thawing that we Buffalonians were rejoicing at it. We had above-freezing temperatures, that it actually melted the snow in my yard, and I saw the green grass again. It was beautiful. It wasn't T-shirt weather yet, but it felt so warm that I didn't mind not wearing a sweater or a jacket when I stepped out of my building to buy coffee from the coffee shop at the next building.

All the while I see my friends and relatives living in California complaining how cold their temperature was, and when I asked them, they were having 50 degrees over there. I was like, are you kidding me? Here in Buffalo, we have 40 degrees, and we think this is warm! Get over it Californians!

Oh well, apparently, our warm weather is over for now. Just this morning, when I looked outside my window, I saw that we had an inch of snow and my green grass is covered again with the white stuff.

I guess that's normal. After all, it's not officially spring yet. But we'll get there.



(Bulbous Sculpture, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

What is the Color of Your Bra?

These past few days, I have witnessed weird female behavior in cyberspace, namely, in Facebook. Starting last Thursday, I saw some of my female friends putting colors as their status updates, such as white or electric blue and I so I thought, what was that about? In fact, one responded saffron and so I thought, she must be cooking.

Anyway, it turned out that more and more of my female friends have been doing it, to the point that I saw one along the lines of pink with violet dots and another being beige with lace. So I decided to look it up.

Apparently, the latest meme was that females should post the color of their bra, just that, in their status update. The males should not know about it, and apparently, the intention was to make people aware of breast cancer.

Whoa, really? How does that make people aware of breast cancer? At first, I thought, heh, that's a fun meme, it's cute, it makes people think. It did make me giggle, once I figured the whole thing out.

But then, weird things happen. Some of my guy friends started copying the trend, and so every now and then, you'll see a guy with a status such as blue and you'll think, Really? You wear them too? Not that I find that wrong, but sometimes it clashes with what you know with that person and it causes some sort of cognitive dissonance.

But perhaps the most disturbing thing is if you see your mother post her bra color in Facebook. There's a reason why no matter how normal sex is, all of us seem to be grossed out by the idea of our parents' having sex. I cannot explain that, but that seems to be the trend. And somehow, knowing your mother's bra color falls along those categories.

So yeah, that was the latest Facebook meme. Was it fun? Well, it depends on how you define fun. Did it accomplish what it needed to accomplish? I don't know. Judging from the articles you see online about the reactions of people, it didn't seem to make people more aware of breast cancer. In my opinion, all it made me aware of was that my female friends wear very interesting bra colors. It didn't provide any informative material about breast cancer and prevention, all it did was provide fodder for the sometimes promiscuous imagination.



(Curl, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Unsweetened Dreams

Sometimes I get the feeling that my dreams are more vivid than the average dream. Sometimes I know why I had a certain dream, but most of the time, I don't. And most of the time, I also do not know why certain things in my waking life are all interconnected in my dream life.

No wonder Freud was so interested in analyzing dreams, because one can say that they reveal something about the subconscious. As if this subconscious is one hidden and inaccessible void.

Anyway, I had two dreams that were bizarre in the recent past.

One involved me and my family. I found myself in our old home back in the Philippines, but it turned into a war zone. And the weird thing is, we were in the future, but in the dystopian future. There was this very sexy girl, who turned out to be a robot, something along the lines of Terminator 3, and she needed a secret code from me. My family didn't know that I possessed the secret code, and I carefully hid it in the form of a T-shirt logo. The T-shirt that had that code was then randomly placed in the laundry that my mom was about to wash. We hid underneath the tables, and the Terminator 3 girl passed by, scanned the brains of my family, but didn't find anything. Somehow, she forgot to scan my brain, so she didn't find the code. Then I woke up.

Another dream I had was bizarre in the sense that it was a combination of several films that I watched both recently and not-so-recently. First, I have to explain The Pillow Book, which is this very interesting movie involving a homosexual publisher who is a guy, a heterosexual writer who is a girl, and a bisexual translator who is a guy, played by Ewan McGregor. The writer has a grudge against the publisher because she thinks that he killed her father ages ago. Anyway, the writer has a fetish of writing on the human skin, so she uses Ewan's body as her canvas, and then Ewan will then head to the publisher, and the publisher will copy the text from Ewan's body. So, the movie had plenty of shots of a butt-naked Ewan McGregor with his arms stretched out and turning around in the publisher's office while the publisher was copying the text.

Then, I have to explain The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where Daniel Day-Lewis played a womanizing Czech doctor, and his most used line in the movie is "Take off your clothes." I think he said that at least 6 times in the movie.

Anyway, given those two information, this is how my dream went. I woke up with a very bad case of measles. I knew that I was vaccinated for MMR when I was a kid, but somehow, I was still attacked. I had no hair in my body whatsoever, because the measles eradicated it. My scalp was bare, and the rashes were there, even in places where the sun doesn't shine. So I had to go to the doctor. When I went to the doctor, I was told to change into this gown, and then the doctor came in. He told me, "Take off your clothes." I was then told to stretch my arms and turn around and around in his office, while admiring the various rashes I have on my body.

At that point I woke up.



(Smithsonian Castle, from my DC Buildings Series)

Why Major in Philosophy

So, ever since I went to college, I had pondered about the choice of one's major and why people choose to major in a certain field. I always thought that there were two types of students: the student who studies a certain field because there is money behind it, regardless of what the student likes or not; and the student who studies a certain field because he really likes it, regardless of whether there is money behind it or not.

So, when I was a freshman in college and had to choose a major, I weighted all these things and thought about what I should major in. I had a set of constraints, and looking at the list of the possible majors in the university I was in, I did an elimination. I wanted to go to music, but I didn't pass the audition, so that was out. I didn't like doing math at that time, so I eliminated a huge swath of majors that needed higher-level math. I also was speaking three languages at that time, so I figured, I might as well study linguistics. It turned out that I liked what I was doing, and so I guess I became the second type of student. I never really thought about whether there is big money in linguistics or not. (Honestly, there isn't much: it's not like nursing or computer science)

Eventually, while in graduate school, I shifted my focus slowly from a pure theoretical linguistics background, to a more of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of language. I started dabbling in psychology, and so I learned how to devise experiments, and I learned how the brain works when it comes to processing language. Now, I guess, this broadens my opportunities. I could work on cognition labs now. I can say now that what I do have scientific and psychological reality. Unlike when I was in undergrad that I was working with language models that well, seemed like magic.

Anyway, so the other night, I was thinking about other fields of study, and what they are useful for. Like, what is the marketability of these majors? Say, Caribbean Studies, or Philosophy, or Women's Studies, or African Studies. Sometimes, it is hard to find what those majors are useful for, it is hard to see how they can be applied to things. It is hard to see how they can convince their dentist that their work is important.

Anyway, to conclude, I was walking the halls of the university one night, while posting fliers for my experiment, when I saw a flier posted on top of a water fountain next to the main office of the Philosophy Department. It read like this:

Premise 1: This is the best drinking fountain on campus.

Premise 2: Majoring in Philosophy is the best and easiest way for you to maximize your opportunities to drink out of this fountain.

Premise 3: Maximizing your opportunities to drink out of this fountain is sufficient reason for majoring in Philosophy.

Conclusion: You should major in Philosophy.



(Headless Robe, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Sagging

So while I was walking all over campus the other day posting my fliers for my experiment, I saw an interesting sight. I saw a guy sporting the sagging fashion. It was bizarre.

I mean, what is attractive about lowering one's pants to the level below one's butt? Is showing one's boxers (they were navy blue, with dark blue stripes) really attractive? I mean, boxer's fabric tend to be very flimsy and thin, so one can easily see the outline of what's being covered.

So, this guy was standing in front of a row of computers, where one can access the computer for fifteen minutes at a time. And he was there, with his sagging pants, and I thought like wow, this must be very bizarre. People's fashion sense has gone berserk, I mean, just look at Lady Gaga. People are bizarre.

Anyway, I looked into this sagging thing, and apparently, it's a hip-hop thing. And in fact, at least one town in the United States considers it a type of disorderly conduct if one does sagging. Depending on how low it is, or whether one's buttcrack is exposed, there are different fines. Now, while I do not agree that sagging is a crime, I still think it is bizarre. I do think that it is a means of expression, and if everyone has freedom of expression, then sure why not, let them sag. In fact, the ACLU has been fighting this town with respect to its sagging rules. I just find it rather irrational.



(Shiva, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

If the Length of a Dissertation Means Something...

...then it is worth mentioning that John Forbes Nash, Jr., the person who is known for game theory, wrote a dissertation that was 32 pages long.

Yes, thirty-two pages long. Thirty-two freaking pages long!

In fact, if you want to see a copy of the dissertation, you can go to this webpage and find a PDF copy of his dissertation. It was type-written, has plenty of hand-written mathematical formulae, has two (yes, TWO!) citations, one of them being himself, and a short acknowledgment.

So, who is John Forbes Nash? If one watched the movie A Beautiful Mind, then one would know who this person is. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics back in 1994. He also is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

I never knew that a dissertation could be this short. At least in my field, psycholinguists typically write shorter dissertations than say, fieldwork-based linguists. So I expect my dissertation to be around the 150-250 page range. A fieldwork-based linguist would probably write around 600-700 pages.

If the length of one's dissertation signifies the amount of time that a person becomes insane, then indeed John Forbes Nash didn't have much time. That also means that I can be insane in the near future too. That also means that fieldworkers are the least insane linguists around. Hmmm, that hypothesis might be problematic.



(Treasury Department, from my Lafayette Square Series)