I want to go ahead and complain…

So I want to go ahead and complain about people who go ahead and insert “go ahead and” before random verbs for no apparent reason.

Actually of course it’s not completely random; they go ahead and do it preferentially in certain contexts (probably not very often including that one where I went ahead and did it right there).

But anyway, it goes ahead and annoys me!

That last context is probably completely non-normative. I’m gonna go ahead and search the web for “it goes ahead and”…

And we (go ahead and) find that the phrase isn’t common, but also isn’t unheard of. Never in the (what’s the word?) tenseless sense of “it goes ahead and annoys me”, but sometimes in the (what’s the other word?) nonspecific present sense of “if you give the program the wrong arguments, it goes ahead and deletes all of your files”.

Thinking about it, this phrase (clause, set of words) doesn’t always annoy me. It feels fine in the imperative, when there is some sort of giving-permission involved. To “Can I eat these?”, it’s clearly (clearly, haha) valid to say “Sure, go ahead”. Or, by obvious extension, “Sure, go ahead and eat as many as you like” or alternately “Go ahead and eat two or three, but leave the rest for the ancestors”.

(Here is Language Hat emself, who we are sure would never annoy us, saying “if you’re sure enough, go ahead and correct the Wikipedia article“, and indeed it seems quite correct.)

Even in non-imperative cases, the wording seems benign enough when there is some sense of permission involved, or notable lack of permission, where the going ahead (now that permission has been granted, or despite the fact that it wasn’t and one should have stopped) is remarkable in itself, in addition to whatever the actual activity was.

So from another web search, “I hate when you tell someone a secret and they go ahead and tell people”, seems plausible, as does “best friend knows you like someone, but they go ahead and date them”, both because, well, they shouldn’t have gone ahead, they should have stopped.

The annoying cases are when people (go ahead and) use it in non-imperative cases, when there is no permission involved at all, where it’s basically just a very long and distracting way of saying “um”. I heard a perfect example on the radio last night but of course I can’t remember it. Let’s see…

Impressive! A little web searching actually found it. The words were, speaking of the fun that giraffes an’ ellafumps have when they have food that is not all pre-processed for them: “If they have a large limb that they can go ahead and strip and pull the leaves off of, then they’ll work on pulling the bark off and then…” and so on.

That, I thought, was pretty clearly just an “um”, only much longer. Looking at it now from the wisdom of another day’s worth of experience, I wonder if this “go ahead and” might be signalling that a process, a set of steps, is coming up. That might be a reasonable excuse.

One more for now, also from NPR somewhere: “I believe it’s possible to get re-elected without taking large campaign contributions. So, why would I not go ahead and try to do that?” What’s up with that one? The sentence feels punchier and more impactful to me without the “go ahead and” (“why would I not try to do that?”). It’s hard to excuse it as a permission thing, and there’s no series of steps there.

So I will go ahead and remain annoyed by that one. :)

Who’s the chief of the BBC?

So this is a pretty cool news story:

Chinese revolt leader becomes village chief of Wukan

The leader of protests against land grabs in a southern Chinese village has been appointed its new chief.

Lin Zulian will head the new Communist Party Committee in Wukan and organise elections for a new village committee.

I mention it, though, not for its content, but because I’m wondering about that word “chief”.

Why does the BBC translate whatever word is officially used to describe this official as “chief”? In English (and perhaps this is an American thing, I dunno), “chief” has connotations of either a guy with a bone through his nose and feathers in his hair, or the guy with the cigar who runs the police or fire department (but not the whole place).

They could have rendered it as “leader” or “head” (both of which they used to refer to him elsewhere in the piece), or (given that he will “head” the Committee) presumably “Chairman” or “Chair” (although it might not be proper to refer to the “Chair” of a village).

If Wukan were a “town” or “city”, one might expect “Mayor” there, but I can buy that it’s a village in some objective sense having to do with population or something. So not using “Mayor” is perhaps understandable.

Does the BBC refer to the leader of a village in England as the “chief”? Let’s see…

Well! Searching for “english village” on the BBC site turns up a whole lot of droll and more or less nostalgic stories, but so far no mention of chiefs or mayors or anything. Perhaps villages aren’t governmental structures at all in England?

The official page about local government in the UK seems to be silent about villages, talking instead about “county and district councils” which may or may not involve mayors who may or may not have any actual powers. Searching for “village” there turns up the fact that local councils are responsible for village greens. Still nothing about village chiefs, though.

So perhaps the BBC uses “chief” for the leader of a village just because they don’t know what else to use, English villages not having leaders?

Okay, so what does a search for “village chief” on the BBC site find? Various chiefs, mostly from China, but also an indigenous Alaskan, a chief from the Ivory Coast, South Sudan, and aha Aberdeen!

Ah, wait. The one in Aberdeen is “David Beattie, chief executive of Aberdeen Sports Village“. Which is perhaps a commercial enterprise that just happens to be called a Village.

It is at least somewhat suggestive, though, that villages in non-Western places have “chiefs”, whereas the Aberdeen Sports Village has a Chief Executive. :) I’d love to see the BBC Handbook that covers this subject…

Update: The New York Times, for what it’s worth, seems to use “party boss” and “party secretary” in this piece about the same thing. The word “chief” is absent from the article.

Friday, October 28, 2011

So Apple is becoming less evil in the sense that back in June they somewhat eased the restrictions on apps with respect to what people making apps that let you buy subscriptions to things can do.

However, they are still evil, in that they still forbid apps from having links to places outside of the app (and therefore outside of Apple’s gigantic cut of the proceeds) where you can buy the stuff they play.

I understand why they want to do this in order to make money, and it is probably legal and even within their rights, but it is still evil. (There are various evil things that one has the right to do; consider the writing of vile racist tracts as an obvious example.) It is evil because it is restricting the programs that I can get on this iPad I own, not in order to make my experience with the device better (which is the reason we iPad owners put up with Apple being the app gatekeeper in the first place), but just in order to advantage Apple itself.

I don’t really mind using a device that reeks slightly of evil, and I hope and imagine and even expect that it will continue to get less evil over time. On the other hand, it does lead me to keep one eye on possible more-open alternatives.

Doy

I was noticing this morning on the drive to work that “Yodels” is “Sledoy” backwards, and that made me think about the lexeme† “doy”, and how amusing it is, and I then noticed I couldn’t think of any English words containing it. Sometime during my first coffee I came up with “doyen”, but that was it. Some random /usr/dict/words produced only “Doyle” (a proper name, doesn’t count), and the Ispell English Word Lists (found in various places on the Web) had “Doyle” and “doyen”, and rather unconvincingly added “doyley” (which is an obscure variant spelling of the already rather obscure “doily”). One or more online dictionaries offers “doyly” as another alternate spelling, but now we’re really off in the weeds.

So, readers! Do you have any good “doy” words to hand? Or an explanation for why there aren’t more? Lots of untapped potential there!

“This is going to be a doyantic day!”

“Could you pass the pandoy?”

“Whoa, look at that saradoya!”

Maybe it’s just part of the “reserved for future expansion” part of the space…

† “lexeme” is almost certainly the wrong word. Readers are invited to suggest the right word.

More evil

Government could hide existence of records under FOIA rule proposal. Or, as I saw it linked originally, Justice Department Wants To Be Able To Lie In Response To Freedom Of Information Requests.

Which seems like a bad idea.

Watching every bit of The Daily Show you can find is of course a good idea. But a recent notable snippet: Climate Change is Real (but the media isn’t nearly as interested in the debunking of “ClimateGate” as they were in the original pseudo-scandal, somehow).

And of course Jon Stewart on Pat Robertson worrying that Republican rhetoric has become too extreme. Which rather boggles.

iTunes-U and Kant and all

I have discovered iTunes U, and it’s pretty hoopy (another reason I am willing to put up with a certain level of evil from Apple). All sortsa free stuff to learn!

You may recall that the other day I was listening to a (decidedly non-free) course on Consciousness and its implications, which was kinda cool, and although I’d gotten a little tired of Prof. Daniel Robinson for some of his odd little quirks of speech and for being wrong about stuff and like that, I was up for some more random audio philosophy, so I downloaded the first couple of lectures from a free iTunes U course on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and started listening.

And it was Prof. Daniel Robinson again!

Which is either quite a coincidence, or there’s not really all that much material out there, or Prof. Dan has done a lot of these things.

So far it is not bad to listen to, although as well as the same little verbal tics (random “you see?”s and “capito?”s and “of.. what? of experience!” and so forth) there is also the occasional burst of cellphone-static on the recording. And there is also Robinson (who outs himself as a Aristotelian, which does not bode well for my agreeing with him about very much) saying rather offhandedly that mathematics and the physical sciences are “riddled” with synthetic a priori truths, and giving as examples “there is no number so large that one cannot be added to it”, “every effect has an antecedent cause”, and “there’s no line so long that you can’t increase its length”.

And of course I disagree.

The synthetic a priori

Synthetic a priori statements are supposedly those that can be known without any reference to experience (so a priori, rather than a posteriori or “empirical”), but which are not true just because of the meanings of the words (so synthetic).

Myself, I rather doubt that there are any of these (for any reasonable construal of “because of the meanings of the words”), and I certainly don’t think that any of Robinson’s examples count. Most of the time when someone claims that something is synthetic a priori, it actually means that they just aren’t imaginative enough to come up with a possible world in which it isn’t true (but there are such possible worlds, and therefore it’s not a priori at all; you have to check the actual world to see if it’s true here or not). Or, alternately, the statement is true but follows so directly from the meanings of the words that it’s hard to justify calling it synthetic if “synthetic” is to have any actual meaning.

“There is no number so large that one cannot be added to it” is clearly not true if we’re working in the domain of, say, positive integers less than 1000. Oh, but that isn’t what we mean by “number”! Well, what do you mean? The answer to that will be a set that has no upper bound, which makes “no number so large that one cannot be added to it” true essentially by the definition of “number”. So that one’s analytic a priori.

“There’s no line so long that you can’t increase its length” is only true in some spaces. It’s not true, for instance, on the surface of a sphere. So this is either synthetic but empirical (i.e. to know it’s true we have to check to make sure we aren’t in a space that’s like the surface of a sphere), or if we add “on a flat plain” to the end it’s again analytic a priori (analytic because it follows directly from the definition of “flat plain”).

The one in the middle, “every effect has an antecedent cause”, is awfully vague, but again can be read in at least two ways, neither of which turns out to be synthetic a priori. Either it’s saying that, in the actual world, events happen in temporally-ordered causal chains (which is something one would definitely have to check the actual world for, since there are scads of possible worlds where things just sort of happen at random and uncaused), or it’s saying that there’s a subset of events, called “effects”, which are those that have “antecedent causes”, and that all of those have antecedent causes. And that is obviously analytic.

Readers are invited to submit more convincing examples of the synthetic a priori. With or without accompanying “doy” words… :)

Update: I meant to close with this picture!

Monday, October 10, 2011

Why do we have “foodstuffs”, but no other stuffs? What about “clothingstuffs”? Or “drinkstuffs”? “sexstuffs, drugstuffs, rockandrollstuffs!”

It’s an odd world.

The Ghost of Dibble Hollow

So driving the little boy home from orchestra, we heard something on WNYC about Christopher Columbus, and that reminded me of how in at least some movie version of Little Women or something the protagonist would exclaim “Christopher Columbus!”, and that on the old (old!) Superman teevee show Perry White would exclaim “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” (which in at least one episode caused that ghost, or someone pretending to be him, to appear), and that in some book that I read as a child there was a ghost (coincidence, that) who would exclaim “Crimenentlies!” or something by way of a satisfying exclamation that would not get them in trouble with the grownups.

I told the little boy that I suspected the book was “The Ghost of Dibble Hollow”, and I wondered if that book was on the web. It is, in fact it is more or less all over the place, including many copies of the same cover that my edition had.

And for that matter there is even one person mentioning it for exactly the same reason I am here, albeit with the exclamation spelt slightly differently.

That was a good book. I haven’t read any kid books recently; I really should. Doesn’t take long, and is good for the soul. Maybe I’ll reread A Wrinkle in Time or somefing.

The kind of libertarian I still am

So reading Griftopia has, at least for the moment, substantially changed the sort of libertarian I am. The change centers around an observation something like “small government would be great, if we had only small crimes”.

The thoroughgoing libertarian will probably respond to this by saying that the only reason we have big crimes now is precisely that we have big government, but that does not seem very likely to me. Certainly the massive fraud perpetrated by Goldman-Sachs and friends in recent years did exploit the government in lots of ways, but it also exploited investors big and small, and various other parts of the private sector. I see no reason to think that if the government was small, there would not be other things (large popular investment firms, pension plans, leading banks) that would be large, and these (and large numbers of private persons) could easily be defrauded of enough money that the fraudsters would be rich enough to buy off the government and prevent their own prosecution.

So, sadly, I think we need a relatively large and expensive government, if only to keep an eye on the inevitable large and wealthy potential criminal organizations. (Not to mention defending the borders.) Of course it’s still a hard fight to keep it from getting corrupted, too! But at least it seems like there’s a fighting chance.

Tweeting Twits

My Second Life self has a Twitter account, which started out being all Second Life type twitterings, but recently has started to be about more and more political stuff, as I observe with benign interest the Occupy Wall Street folks and etc, and get into the occasional squabble with some right-wing type, one or two of which I follow (“follow”) out of general interest.

Had a bit of a frank exchange of views with one Joe Brooks, who seems to be sort of a halfway sensible conservative, at least sometimes. He is quite anti-Occupy, and more pro-TeaParty, whereas I am rather the opposite. He thinks Occupy Wall Street and so on were started by and are controlled by Communists and Labor Unions and things, whereas I think the Tea Party was started by and is controlled by the Koch Brothers, their (shudder) Americans for Prosperity, and the Republican machine in general.

My impression of the Tea Party is that they took some “stop giving money to rich people!” sentiment around the time of the TARP bailouts, added some “Lower my taxes!” to obtain a general “The Government should tax and spend less!” which could then easily be bent into “Less government regulation!”, which is of course exactly what the rich people want, so that they can continue to become richer, some of them by more or less blatantly illegal and/or immoral means. Quite an ironic circularity there.

I can well imagine someone co-opting the Occupy Wall Street folks’s “stop financial industry fraud!” into “more regulation of Wall Street” and then “more regulation of business” and then “more government power”, which tends to become “more power to the already powerful!”, which is again what various of the bad guys want.

So one has to be careful. But in the case of Occupy, I don’t think that’s happened (yet?).

Here is a very excellent open letter and warning from a former tea party movement adherent to the Occupy Wall Street movement all about co-optation and stuff. Everyone should read it.

The kind of Obama fan I (still) am(n’t)

So I am really not hardly at all happy with Our President.

I mean, WTF.

Got rid of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; that’s good. But…

He’s surrounded by the same Goldman-Sachs crowd that destroyed the economy for their own personal gain, and they are as far as I can tell now working to make sure that they and their cronies still in the private sector can do it again next time they want another few billion dollars in the kitty.

He’s not turned off the absurd waste of Federal money on the stupid and immoral practice of prosecuting and persecuting medical marijuana providers who are doing things that are completely legal under their state laws. He promised he would do this, and he very simply isn’t.

He’s kept us in stupid wars, expanded those wars, and gotten us into new ones. He pretty much promised that he would do this, too, but I think most of us assumed he was just saying that to get votes. That’ll teach us to hope that someone is being a hypocrite!

(In, ironically enough, his Peace Prize speech, he basically announces that America will wage war not just to defend itself and its allies, but to make sure that every nation in the world respects “the inherent rights and dignity of every individual”. I mean, excuse me? Not with my children, you don’t!)

He has claimed the amazing ability to execute American citizens without trial, on the unilateral say-so of the President. I mean, what the F’ing F? This is completely hideous, unconstitutional, unAmerican, nasty, dangerous, and wrong. We were horrified when Dubya merely claimed the ability to imprison (“detain”) citizens without due process. How can we be calm when Obama claims the ability to kill us?

Anyone who is thinking, well, this was a special case, and it was Obama after all, please consider:

2014, President Romney dies from a bad batch of Botox, and Vice-President Bachmann gets the top spot. Shortly afterward she has a vivid dream in which God tells her that America is at war with atheism.

Two weeks later simultaneous drone strokes take out the national headquarters of American Atheists and the Ethical Culture Society, as well as Richard Dawkins, in the U.S. on a speaking tour. Casualties are in the hundreds.

The Bachmann administration claims that it was a legal national security action, and cites the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki as precedent.

Couldn’t happen? Well, if the Obama administration’s assassination of al-Awlaki was legal, you will have to explain to me why the hell not.

This is why we have warrants, judges, checks and balances, separation of powers.

Phht.

So the President seems to be a not particularly Progressive statist with ambitions of American expansionism. The potential Republican nominees are all either insane, lying hypocrites, or both. I am not overjoyed!

But this, too, shall pass.

In other news

Here is a Stanford (related) AI class that anyone in the world can take and apparently some hundreds of thousands of people intend to. I understand their servers are needing some upgrading. :)

And today’s candidate for Shortest 419 Letter, presented in its entirely:

Be my partner in this huge $17.3M deal.

Enticing, eh?

The evils of convenience

I am pretty fond of this here WordPress theme. On the other hand I am not fond of the right-justification (nearly always a bad idea on computers except in the most thoroughly-typeset documents), nor of the egregious grey lines around all my images. Guess that is the price I pay for not having to hand-code and SCP-upload all these here words!

Hm.

Autoxenophobia

Well we all have a face
That we hide away forever
And we take them out and
Show ourselves
When everyone has gone
Some are satin some are steel
Some are silk and some are leather
They’re the faces of the stranger
But we love to try them on
– Joel, B

I (well, Dale) invented this word over on Twitter, where people were talking about similarities (or not) between anti-gay folks who turn out to be gay, and anti-pseudonym folks (see Google Plus Nymwars), who might be, say, afraid of odd nameless, or oddly-named, things within themselves.

Autoxenophobia: use it often!

Fear of the Stranger Within…

Come November

One interesting difference here (although it’s a difference of culture or tradition and affordance, not a strictly-speaking necessary difference) is that posts will tend to be smaller, and with titles, rather than, as in the old log where they were perhaps longer, and titled only by date, so that you got “here’s what I’ve thought that I feel is worth recording today” rather than “here’s what I’m thinking right now, about this subject, or at least with this subject sitting there on top”.

(Another difference might be that wordpress might start putting ads onto the pages; if that gets annoying I will consider giving them money to stop doing it. Or moving back to the old site.)

(Also I’m not sure if these pages will validate, HTML/CSS-wise. But somehow I am not as concerned about that as I now and then was, or pretended to be, in the Old Days.)

Anyway! Come November I may be writing another novel. The question will be, what sort of novel this time?

Awhile back, I posted a list of the existing novels, and what each one was sort of subjectively like.

I feel like fiddling with the medium again, at the moment at least, rather than just writing a straightforward story. Not sure just why that is. :)

And of course it may change by November.

But at the moment the playing-with-the-medium that I’m thinking of is using the rather obscure variant of first-person limited in which you get just the narrator’s experiences of the external world, without internal monologue (or dialogue), explanations, or exposition.

I sat up in the bed. A woman in a white uniform brought me food, which I ate.

Another woman came in, and stood at the foot of the bed. She said things. I continued eating, looking at her, but said nothing.

The woman at the foot of the bed said more things, in a louder voice.

Eventually, I said things back.

Could be interesting. Fifty thousand words of interesting? Maybe… :)