"Simply go eat Chinese"

"Why doesn't the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapults and radioactive road runner pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?"

Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace p. 352

Or as tweeted elsewhere:

"why doesnt the coyote tke the $ he spends on bird costumes & radioactive roadrunner food pelets & expl misiles and simply go eat Chinese?"

A 27 character difference in quotations.

How to Make a Label Post in Blogger

If you're using blogger and know some UNIX it's pretty simple to make a label post for your blog. Yes you could do this with a widget, but then you might miss a chance to use sed.

First go to the Dashboard.

Click on 'Edit Posts' and then the manage posts page should have all of your labels on the left side.

Go to your browser and view the source. Save the source to a local file - in this case it's posts.g.html.

Next go to your UNIX terminal and select only the labels for your blog using:

grep "apply_" post* | sed -e 's/<\/option>/\
/g' | sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;/ temp.1

Go ahead and remove any spaces at the start of a line:

sed -e 's/^ //g' temp.1 > temp.2

Format the labels as a URL anchor with the /search/label blogger path. You should of course replace www.boldlentil.com with your blog name:

sed -e 's/ /%20/g' temp.2 | awk '{printf ("<a href=http://www.boldlentil.com/search/label/%s&g;t\n", $1)}' > temp.url

Finally create the anchor text and paste the pieces together:

awk -F : '{printf ("%s</a>, \n", $1)}' < temp.2 > temp.sa
paste temp.url temp.sa | awk -F ~ '{printf ("%s ", $1)}' > temp.ml

Paste the resulting HTML in the Edit HTML view for writing a new post:


37, al Qaeda, al Zawahiri, Alcatraz, amigos, ammonites, andre the giant, Andy Goldsworthy, angel, angle, annoyance, app-engine, arcade room, artichoke, Aspasia, Atlanta airport, attention, azkaban, backwards post, bad McLuhan pun, baidu, Bansky, barcelona, basketball, Beaver Falls, binder clip, Bloc Party, blogging, blogoflat, blög, Bottom of the Hill, boulders, bouncing ball, brazil, bromeliads, bucket, Buddha's hand citron, buddies, BugRank, bulgaria, bus stop, Bush, calculadora, calculator, CAPTCHA, carnegie international, carry-by, cartoons, carved lids, cat, cellophile, cellular automata, chew lips, Chomsky, cloud calculator, coast starlight, comments, computers, constult, corpus linguistics, cross-blogging, crowdsourcing, curve, dachshund, dan black, David Lesar, david shrigley, dead moose, delucidate, devils tower, diachronic post, divide by zero, dots, dried fallen oak branches, dried flower, drip, Dubai, duck-milker, durian, ear-witness, economy, Elvis, estarcido, explicandum, fake, fengyun bang, files, filing, filing cabinet post, flag lapel pin, foof, freeland, fruit, fuzzy math, geo-stencil, get well soon, glasses, goals, Granada, Grand Ole Party, Halliburton, halloween, hapax legomenon, Helsinki, horus, house slave, iframe, imágenes, in-situ measurement not recommended, inflatable animals, intelligent design, ira, James Joyce, james yuill, Joe Biden, Karl Rove, keywords, Kuwait, labels, laccolith, large eyes, large print, lean blogging, leaves, Legos, lemma, leopard, lesbian Wiccan Texan cellists, links, lists, lobster, Louise Bourgeois, low vision, lucuma, lynkbaiters, macaroni and cheese, maverick, mavericks, mayonnaise, mccain, memory, Merch, metronomy, Michael Palin, mixpost, mnemonic, mnemosyne, monkeys, monolith, moose, mosaics, muda, mullet, narratives, ni, night runner, ninja. ninja kick, non-dairy whipped topping lid, Not On My Island, notes, obama, objects, oboe, obtuse, oil, old years resolution, olympics, p.o.n.d., palin, pals, panga, partial success vs none, personal space, phat thu, pi, piles, Pittsburgh, playpost, plugs, pneumatic, Portland, president bh, proper respects, pumpkin, python comments with non-ascii, pöst, quarry, quotes, reference sheet, reremembered words, reverse long tail, robot, rock, roman, roof, saccades of beauty, Salvador Dali, Sarah Palin, school of seven bells, sculpture, seen, sertão, seven, shelf, shoe, signs and symbols, skull, snowflakes, software divergence, spanish, sphinx, spider, spiritual design, spleen, steady hitter, steganblography, stencil, sticker, sticks, strange activity, super-cross-linky, sweaters, symbol hunter, tabula rasa, tabula rasa engineering reference sheet, tag cloud, tags, tamarillos, tesserae, the big pink, the shortwave set, thirsty, tips, title is the tip, toast, tonterías, tools, train, transformer, translucency, triple-r, twitter, Ulysses, unique Englishes, videos, Voronoi Diagrams, w, walking, walks into a bar joke, water-cooler test, whinging, wiener dog, wink, wrestling moves, wyoming, youtube vs itunes, π, Ἀσπασία, 搜索风云榜,

Yesterday I Heard a Woman Get Hit by a Car

Unseen, a woman and a car collide.

That sudden stillness and undivided attention by the onlookers. People reach for cell phones and traffic stops.

The sound is nothing like a car crash.

Nothing fatal, no head injuries but a thrown body and significant bodily injury.

A doctor happens to be on the seen. A siren in the distance and questions of what to do.

Staring doesn't seem to be all that helpful but several people don't seem to be able to do much else.

Getting impatient with blocked traffic also doesn't seem to be helpful but several people seem to have other places to go.

Being oblivious also seems unhelpful but two women drink coffee and talk about youth soccer until the fire truck lurches up. "What happened?" they ask. "A woman just got hit by a car" a staring person replies. "Oh wow."

A listening person marvels that staring and being oblivious are options but then is being an ear-witness any more helpful?

A Blue Sun in a Yellow Sky

Notes and quotes from Obama's Dreams from My Father.

Dreams from My Father
Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press
442 pages

5 - Obama - born 1961, father left Hawaii in 1963 when Obama was two
12 - miscegenation - 1960 - still a felony in over half of the states.
15 - "... where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams"
38 - "But her knowledge of floods and exorcisms and cockfights left much to be desired." {likewise for my mom}
79 - "...when the imperatives of harvest or work in the factory aren't supposed to dictate identity, so that how to live is bought off a rack or found in magazines..."
86 - "His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me, the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in it's discipline, forged through sheer force of will." {on Malcolm X. Lincoln also undertook repeated acts of self-creation}
94 - "Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection."
110 - "Look into yourself before you pass judgement. Don't make someone else clean up your own mess. It's not about you."
122 - "...free to choose a motif around which to organize my life, free to patch together a collage of styles, friends, watering holes, political affiliations." {the easier path not taken}
133 - "Change will come from a mobilized grass roots."
141 - "With the unions in the shape they're in, the churches are the only game in town." {quoting something Marty Kaufman said}
155 - "That's why people become involved in organizing - because they think they'll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power."
178 - 'Couldn't get away with nothing, 'cause your momma had eyes and ears up and down the whole block.' {an anonymous Chicagoan. Also quoted here.}
182 - 'I guess we worked so long for nothing, we feel like we shouldn't have to break our backs just to survive.' {quoting Mr. Foster}
190 - "...people carried within them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories." {where does the group narrative stop and where does personal narrative begin?}
194 - "What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics."
195 - "That hate hadn't gone away; it formed a counternarrative burried deep within each person.."
200 - "...nationalism dissipated into an attitude rather than any concrete program, a collection of grievances and not an organized force..."
203 - "As it was, many had already given up the hope that politics could actually improve their lives, much less make demands on them..."
220 - "...as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in a yellow sky..."
242 - "I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way. It was the sort of change that's important not because it alters your concrete circumstances in some way (wealth, security, fame) but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on..."
280 - 'a buppie church' {quoting an older pastor of another church}
284 - 'A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness' {title of a Trinity pamphlet}
327 - ambit - boundary or scope
337 - "If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it." {quoting an aunt}
346 - "These wazungu care more about one dead elephant than they do for a hundred black children." {quoting his half sister on wazungu}
353 - "But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid." {quoting Francis}
355 - "But the British have so much more, but seem to enjoy things less." {quoting an English doctor living in Malawi}
365 - "...you don't know what it's like to spend the night in a Nairobi jail." {says a brother in Kenya and as reported by the BBC.}
348 - "the country's forty black tribes" and "Most Kenyans still worked with older maps of identity, more ancient loyalties."
367 - 600 mile train trip from from Mombasa to the shores of Lake Victoria.
369 - home squared
370 - panga - machete. Grandfather, one panga - Alego and the other panga - Kogelo
377 / 378 - night runners
373 - "I think perhaps education doesn't do us much good unless it is mixed with sweat." {quoting Sayid}
382 - "When two locusts fight, it is always the crow who feasts."
406 - "What I have not seen doesn't make my heart heavy."

The Corpus as Performance Art

Keywords, notes and quotes from:

Corpus Linguistics
Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson
Edinburgh University Press
1996
206 pages

2 - Corpus linguistics is a methodology, rather than an aspect of language
2 - Corpus linguistics applied to syntax, semantics and pragmatics
3 - longitudinal studies
4 - "basic corpus methodology was widespread in linguistics for a long period of time."
4 - Chomsky (1957 & 1965) - "invalidated the corpus as a source of evidence in linguistic inquiry." {... and apparently single-handedly lead a migration away from empiricism towards rationalism in linguistics.}
5 - Chomsky - language competence vs. performance (I & E languages)
5 - performance a poor model of competence {corpus as performance art?}
6 - observation vs. introspection
6 - explicandum
8 - language is non-enumerable
8 - corpora are skewed
10 - early limitation - data processing
12 - frequency
15 - concordance program
18 - corpus and intuition complementary
19 - footnote ten - "One is irresistibly drawn to remembering Galton's words:
"until the phenomena of any branch of knowledge have been submitted to measurement and number, it cannot assume the dignity of a science'" {bold lentil's italics}
19 - Leech (92 and 91) references
21 - Corpus, any body of text with 1. sampling and representativeness, 2. finite size, 3. machine readable form, and 4. a standard reference.
22 - accurate picture of variety
22 - Monitor corpus
22 - Synchronic snapshot
24 - annotation
26 - CoCoA references
27 - Text Encoding Initiative - TEI
33 - Orthography, character encoding, 35
36 - parts-of-speech annotation, grammatical tagging, morphosyntactic annotation
39 - programs to tag parts of speech - 95% success rates (such as CLAWS)
40 - Ditto tags - used for more than one word in a phraseological unit...
42 - lemmatization - reducing words to their respective lexemes or head word form which would be looked in a dictionary
42 - lemma
43 - parsing
43 - treebanks
46 - constraint gammer
46 - context-free phrase structure grammar
49 - generally auto-parsing software has lower success rates than automatic parts-of-speech tagging
49 - semantics
50 - content analysis
51 - 31241100 - colour - semantic tag? Wilson - forthcoming? from Schmidt (1993)
52 - discourse tags
52 - anaphoric annotation - marking of pronoun reference
cohesion - 'the vehicle by which elements in texts are interconnected through use of pronouns, repetition, substitution, etc {as in this post lacks cohesion}
53 - bootstrapping problem
54 - prosodic annotation - suprasegmental features, stress, intonations, pauses - significant differences in transcribers
57 - multilingual corpora
54 - parallel corpora
58 - aligned corpora
61 - corpus - maximally representative finite sample
64 - representativeness - sample, population and sampling frame
65 - demographic sampling, stratificational sampling
66 - "rarer features on the other hand show more variations in their distributions and consequently require larger samples..." de Haan (1992)
67 - Language and Computers and Statistics for Corpus Linguistics
67 - tokens and types - frequency counts
68 - proportions - useful for comparing frequencies across corpora
69 - statistical significance testing - chi-squared test - widely used in corpus linguistics: + more sensitive that t-test, + does not assume normal data, + in 2 x 2 tables is easy to compute - but is unreliable with small frequencies
71 - collocations - characteristic co-occurence patterns of words
71 - mutual information and z-score - the more strongly connected two items are, the higher the mutual information
73 - multi-variate analysis: factor analysis, principle component analysis, correspondence analysis, multi-dimensional scaling, and cluster analysis
74 - Cross tabulation, intercorrelation matrix, factor analysis - "summarize" the similarities in variables with factors.
75 - correspondence analysis - summarize similarities by a smaller number of "best fit" axes
76 - Cluster analysis: single vs. average linkage, hierarchical - dendrogram, and non-hierarchical items can be in more than one cluster
79 - Hayashi's quantification Method Type III
82 - log-linear analysis
83 - Variable rule analysis - VARBRUL
83 - Probabilistic language modeling
87 - "Although many researchers will refer to their data as a corpus, frequently these data do not fit the definition of a corpus in the sense that we have tended to use that term in this book - as many other corpus linguists have - for a body of text which is carefully sampled to be maximally representative of a language or language variety."
89 - Intonation group boundaries
90 - Lexicography - study of words
94 - parser
95 - Probabilistically ordered choices...
95 - Register
97 - Fuzzy categories and gradience
98 - Pragmatics - "meaning in context"
99 - Elicited vs. naturalistic data
99 - Dialectology
107 - Diachronic - something happening over time, as opposed to synchronic - which is a "snapshot" at a specific time.
108 - Mystery of vanishing reliability
109 - "Common core" vs. 'unique Englishes'
112 - Studies of linguistic impairment
117 - "new, and alternative goals [for computational linguistics] have been added; such as the creation of working systems based on empirical data which sacrifice some or all cognitive plausibility for improved performance."
118 - Cognitively plausible vs. cognitively implausible
118 - 'Quantitative approaches to the solution of problems in artificial intelligence have long had a difficult hurdle to leap, so clearly expressed by McCarthy:' "Where do all the numbers come from?" 'The answer for NLP for now at least is clear - a corpus.' {not to pick nits but shouldn't it be - corpora?}
118 - "but where cognitive plausibility is sacrificed to brute force mathematical modeling, corpora are the sine qua non of such an approach. Corpora provide the necessary raw data for approaches to computational linguistics based upon abstract numerical modeling."
118 - Knowledge base
119 - Disambiguation
119 - Part-of-speech annotation
120 - "so the corpus, unlike the chicken or the egg, definitely comes first!"
119 - "any sacrifice of cognitive plausibility is most often one of degree, and rarely an absolute."
120 - Part-of-speech taggers
120 - Lexicon - corpus can be used to build, typically hundreds of thousands of words.
122 - morphological analysis
122 - Syntactic idiom
123 - disambiguation based on a matrix of probabilities
123 - 'human grammar is essentially a probabilistic grammar' Halliday
124 - "disambiguation remains the predominant use of quantitative data in NLP."
128- "postulate semantic affinities between words by measuring the frequency with which words co-occur in close proximity to one another."
125 - tagset - part-of-speech distinctions made by a machine learning system
128 - Association ratio - how often do words co-occur? Also note 12, relative to the frequency
129 - Parsing - 130 - has 30-40% accuracy
131 - 'Knowledge acquisition bottle-neck'
132 - Atheoretic account of language, radical statistical grammars
133 - Independence from hand-crafted linguistic rules
133 - Magerman (1994) Stanford thesis.
137 - "are models of cognition relevant to human beings the best models on which to base computer models?"
139 - "without parallel aligned corpora, there would be no example-based machine translation and no statistical machine translation."
149 - "In short, a corpus should be an an exceptionally good tool for identifying and describing a sublanguage, because they both have one thing in common - a finite nature."
137 - Statistical translation - eschews cognitive plausibility
138 - trigram - three words together in a sequence
138 - example-based machine translation
144 & 206 - Zernik - exploiting online resources to build a lexicon
147 - using corpora to examine a linguistic hypothesis
147 - Sublanguages - constrained variety of a language. may be naturally occurring. key feature - lacks typical productivity of a language.
147 - Chapter six as a case study
148 - closure - feature of a language variety in which the language is tending towards being finite.
150 - IBM manuals as a a possible sublanguage or at least a higher degree of closure than the other two corpora under consideration.
154 - corpus size - and the frequency of the feature to be observed
154 - open-class part-of-speech
165 - "Each new sentence means a new sentence type." {Likewise, each new incomplete sentence a new incomplete sentence type

The Medium is a Mess, eh?

The cutting board was about to be thrown out.

The yogurt had been eaten. The lid was sitting to go out with the recycling.

An x-acto knife was out for some reason.

The lid cut like some kind of polymer.

Soon there was one box with washed, used lids and another box with carved, sometimes spray painted lids.

Now there's a magazine of carved lids.

The medium is a mess, eh?

Lajedo do Pai Mateus

The quarry of Pai Mateus in Paraíba, Brazil is a striking place.

Giant boulders baking in the sun.

The dry sertão rolling off into the distance.

A woman drove off after a heated soccer match between local teams with her infant daughter straddling the gas tank of her motorcycle, bare thin hair to the steady wind.

The way to the top follows a huge sloping dome of rock. The boulders just start showing up closer to the top. Round, ovular, lumpy, smooth, crumbling. Stray vegetation pokes through cracks and hides in crevices.

A horse in the darkness wound it's way slowly down the sidewalk to the lobby of the hotel but thinking differently headed back.

At the top is the helmet shaped rock where the Pai Mateus or Father Matthew spent part of the 18th century. Isolated, quiet. An arching large indentation in a massive rock, a natural protection from sun and weather.

A farmer used a machete to chopped a pile of charred cactus to feed to his livestock.

Thinking about it makes me thirsty.

Eagles Over Klamath Lake

There are things you miss when you fly or drive - like the eagles soaring over Klamath Lake in the morning. That and the Coast Starlight has an arcade room.



BYOSB or Bring Your Own Sleeping Bag. Get a seat away from the doors if you can - they are noisy and foot traffic doesn't fall off until well after midnight. The arcade room was mostly empty but every now and then one of the machines would erupt with an advertisement for a video gaming system "available in 1995". At one point the arcade room was full of a group of people grooving to someone playing a guitar and another point it was a few people waiting for the next smoking stop.

The food varies and includes ramen noodles. You can also bring your own ramen noodles. The young couple ahead of me traveling with their infant was having ramen for dinner and breakfast. The breakfast ramen was delayed due to an unplanned engine change in Oakland. Someone gave me a couple of cans of beer for the trip. The floor of the downstairs become sticky at one point. The fog in southern Oregon was so thick that the afternoon sun was dimmed and it was hard to see even 20 feet from the train. An amputee with a metal leg struggled with the swaying train. One kid kept punching the door opening button for moving between cars. I overheard the conductors discuss seating arrangements and carry-bys or passengers that miss their stops. I saw a carry-by rushing off in Emeryville.

But the saccades of beauty make it all worthwhile.

Gran Rostro de Obama and the Familiar Faces of the Blogosphere

La Vanguardia in Barcelona, Spain has posted a video clip about a giant Obama face being created there. A geo-stencil in progress.

A strangely familiar comment thread follows with the not unreasonable questions of who's paying for this? and what if McCain wins?

Then there are the not unexpected accusations of terrorist and silliness and whoever wins will be better than Bush and some Barcelona bashing and mamarrachada and what a multi-cultural display. Then there is the obligatory racist troll declaring that in the US "98% de los negros votarán a obama sin ningún tipo de racionalidad" or "98 percent of the blacks will vote for Obama without any type of rational analysis". This is truly the election of giant, messy, fearful comment threads. Fortunately this is also an election of creative expression, of volunteer graphic design, of steady artistic support in the face of bitterness and division. Then there are the comments about the movie Bienvenido Mr. Marshall. Another commenter notes that they are tired of the craziness of doing or not doing things based on what the estadounidenses are doing or not doing. Trust me at this point the estadounidenses are tired of it as well.

Merch Rocks & Roles

Every now and then there is a live performance that leaves you completely reeling.

What happened? Where am I? Is this my mini-van? Why is there so foofing much highway construction after midnight?

Merch made it to the Bottom of the Hill and I sat on the floor with a handful of the select. It doesn't matter how we got there and it doesn't really matter whether there is a punch-line or a point or a narrative arc but let's assume you managed to get to the Bottom of the Hill not long after the lead singer of Merch got off his Greyhound bus from Texas.

You part with your hard earned $8 and enter the new world.

It's empty. Emptier than anyone can every remember it being empty. Like that creepy endless hallway in the House of Leaves. Like your refrigerator before a Catalan-American inserts a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. Like the tabula rasa engineering reference sheet. Like nothing but a tip-less bartender watching the Olympics and a bored considerate female bouncer waiting for a phone call.

And then there's Merch.

Like the illegitimate offspring of Garrison Keillor and Anthony Kiedis, comes the lead singer of Merch with his uneven striped skull socks and his devoted dreadlocked back-up singer. For some reason the lesbian Wiccan cellist stayed in Texas. The veggy oil powered van is history or at least seemingly only a reason to be stopped in tunnels leading to Manhattan or a distraction for the many cops encountered while touring.

Words are weak but let's keep trying.

Imagine a bearded storytelling grind-core notebook referring oversized hobbit and it's a start. Add a near-deaths Australian traveling vegan guitar strumming emancipated never-say-quit solo rocking incomprehensible lyrics dude and you're a millimeter from start. Stories and rock and a considerate request to imagine a rocking cello part during the slower interludes.

rainforest

Sticks and Leaves, Deeply Perceives

It was the third try.

Nothing but sticks and leaves. And time.

In an Andy Goldsworthy inspired moment, the large sticks finally held and a portable center came together. Next the U and Y shaped branches to round corners. Progressively smaller sticks and finally brittle leaves.

Someone said 'nice wreath' and I guess it was.



But then the after-the-fact connections to wattle fencing and patterans were also possibilities. Sticks and nothing but sticks to segment space. Start with the larger sticks then use the smaller sticks. The first two tries showed the folly of adding larger sticks later. An unstable freestanding figure. Shifting tensions, and a sudden pile. Also puncture the leaves first with a smaller stick then thread them through a larger stick to be woven into the larger structure. Otherwise the leaves ripe.

Fine it's imitation but I never got quite so much out of imitating Warhol or Neckface. Pay attention to the flex in the stick, focus on the weak areas, carefully reinforce and compare sticks from different trees. It's temporary but so is everything.

I left it on a redwood stump.

Grand Ole Party and the Sphinx

The drum had a sphinx on it. But not the sphinx of the U.S. military intelligence branch. A different sphinx. "Look Out Young Son" was played, the crowd swayed. What it is about a woman that sings and plays the drums?



Certainly helps that she can sing and the bassist can bass and the guitarist can guitar. "Went into town one night and the crowd like water parted". But what is it about the sphinx? The guy with the Victorian sailers hat on? The heavy guy with the lamb chop side-burns and the Paris Hilton glasses? The pitchers of water on the end of the bar? The no stage diving signs? Who reads Three Cups of Tea and House of Leaves at the same time? After a couple drinks it's a sticky floor and creepy vision of a Pakistani schoolhouse that sprouts new hallways and rooms, all incredibly hot and humid, and a 20 something sphinx gruffly singing "when I bloom you come a-crawlin'".