Kapitano

2012-02-16T01:01:00.000Z

"The internet makes you stupid."

- Internet Rule #77

Message from the Sick Bed

2012-02-15T18:09:00.001Z

"Things just seem to keep cropping up don't they?"

Last week I was feeling vaguely ill. Yesterday I had a mysterious bruise-like lump on my forehead and a swollen lymphnode under one ear.

Today I've got a neat line of swelling down the right side of my head, and I'm living on penicillin and cocodomol for the constant ear- and head-aches.

The doctor says this is all due to my diabetes-weakened immune system. Which is due to too many cakes as a teenager.

So the message is clear. Instead of spending my youth snacking while studying all night, I should have been playing soccer and shagging, with the other boys.

2012-02-15T01:01:00.000Z

"In heaven, all the interesting people are missing."

- Frederich Nietzsche

2012-02-14T01:01:00.000Z

"It is better for a leader to make a mistake in forgiving than to make a mistake in punishing."

- Muhammed

2012-02-13T01:01:00.000Z

"Something is missing."

- Paul Morley

2012-02-12T01:01:00.000Z

"To hold on to your seriousness is quite an achievement in an age of silliness such as ours."

- Mark Simpson

2012-02-11T01:01:00.000Z

"It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all of the answers."

- James Thurber

2012-02-10T01:01:00.000Z

"He let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it."

- Stephen King

2012-02-09T01:01:00.000Z

"There’s nothing about not caring about someone which means you have to treat them in a uncaring fashion."

- Dan Savage

2012-02-08T01:01:00.000Z

"Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship."

- Kenneth Tynan

2012-02-07T01:01:00.000Z

"The ink of scholars out-weighs the blood of martyrs."

- Muhammed

2012-02-06T01:01:00.000Z

"Ritual is never without a purpose."

- Johnathan Meades

2012-02-05T01:01:00.000Z

"Many of the best things in life are terrible."

- Neuroskeptic Blog

2012-02-04T01:01:00.000Z

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use."

- Soren Kierkegaard

What's the Magic Word?

2012-02-03T09:36:00.002Z

There's a fairy story which I'm sure you're heard. It's about a princess who's visited by an evil dwarf-like creature, who promises her whatever she wishes...provided he takes her first born child. She agrees, thinking she can cheat and keep the child when she eventually has it. Of course, all her security magically fails and the baby (a boy, inevitably) is kidnapped.

She begs with the creature, but he's adamant - she made the contract in full knowledge, and now she's paying precisely what she agreed.

There is a loophole though. If she can say the creature's name, he loses his powers, the contract is void, the princess gets to keep her wishes and she gets her son back.

The name, of course, is "Rumpelstiltskin". Once she learns the name and says it to his face, he can scream and rage as much as he likes, but he's as trapped by the letter of the contract as she was. The contract, it seems, is more powerful even than a supernatural being that has great power over the physical world.

Words are the strongest magic of all.

Word magic, and in particular the magic of names, is a superstition that's persisted for millennia - and it's still around today.

When ancient Greek and Roman armies claimed new towns, often the only difference it made to the lives of the locals was a notice placed in the town square, informing them that they were now part of an empire. But it seemed to work - they believed it.

When the Julian calender was switched to the Gregorian, there were actual riots on the basis that several days had been magicked out of existence by the stroke of a pen - and people thought they'd been cheated out of a part of their own lifespans.

Even now, when state and county lines are redrawn, residents protest at being displaced from one side to the other of an imaginary line.

In Arthur C Clarke's short story "The Nine Billion Names of God", the universe gets literally switched off when all the names of god are calculated by a computer, owned by an obscure order of monks. The monks don't even need to read the output, the assemblage of vacuum tubes has no consciousness of what it's doing, and it doesn't seem to matter that this is done by a few dozen people on a mountain on one unremarkable planet. When the final permutation of written characters is printed, the stars start to go out.

This is obviously a thinly disguised version of the talmudic superstition that when all permutations of JHV are worked through, creation ends. The wordgames of the kabala and biblical skip codes aren't a million miles away. In alchemy, saying the right words is as important as having the right chemicals.

Fantasy literature is a place where hidden cultural superstitions can be more openly explored. In Ursula le Guin's "Earthsea" series, the hero can only defeat the monster he created by figuring out it's name - which is of course his own name. There's also a realm where word-based sorcery doesn't work because things have different names there. In Terry Pratchett's Discworld, you can only defeat the monster if you can bring yourself to say it's name. In "Alice in Wonderland" there's a forest which is spooky simply because things don't have names there at all.

Language is slippery and constantly changing, as is the reality it tries to describe - or control. But we seem to have a persistent belief that if only we can find exactly the right words, they'll describe and control the world in exactly the right way. And they'll be so perfect that even when word and world have changed over centuries, the formulation will still work exactly as well.

This of course is why we have legal documents in tortuous legalese. And indeed the majority of philosophy which consists in trying to tie down the precise meaning by finding exactly the right form of words - in the hope that, tied down tightly enough, the words will merge with the reality, permanently.

It's also why we have the constantly refuted article of faith that our holy books are both clear and eternally true...if read in the original language. And we believe this even when we know that the original documents have been lost, and the ones we have are partial copies of copies of copies.

The Hebrew of the old testament sometimes is just plain incomprehensible - or 'obscure' as theologians delicately put it - but there are thousands of devout believers who devote their lives to the assumption that if only they read the text closely enough, it will become clear.

Sometimes they go mad and write books on how if you read a parable about sheep backwards and make anagrams from every third letter, it predicts their favourite historical events.

It's all very well to smugly note the superstitions about word magic and say you're beyond them. But what about the American constitution? A set of supposedly inviolable super-laws, which determine which non-super-laws can be passed. The failure to (for instance) separate church from state is evident, but if you want to fight the spreading power of lunatic evangelical groups, the constitution is a major line of defence.

When politicians debase language with feelgood cliches and vacuous non-distinctions, we keep hold of reality by reasserting genuine, meaningful language, and using it for our own slogans and polemic.

Perhaps word magic isn't just a superstition we're better off without. Perhaps it's a necessary part of human consciousness - the price of the capacity to categorise the world and conceptualise our interactions with it. A by-product of being able to think at all.

2012-02-03T01:01:00.000Z

"We have somehow created for ourselves languages that are just a bit too flexible and expressive for our brains to handle."

- Geoffrey K Pullum

2012-02-02T01:01:00.000Z

"The lesser of two evils is still evil."

- Penn Gilette

The Pyramid of Stupid

2012-02-01T18:04:00.006Z

I would like to introduce you to Kapitano's Law of Professional Competence: For every one person employed to do something professionally, there are a hundred amateurs doing it much better...and a thousand who completely suck at it.

This is why most published novels are rubbish, and most stories you read on the internet are even worse, but a few net stories are outstandingly brilliant. You could spend your whole life reading excellent self-published net fiction and never read a dead-tree book again...if only it didn't take your entire life to find all the good stuff.

It works for music, political analysis, humour, philosophy, and I rather suspect, porn.

Take this utterly execrable net article - and the unintentionally hilarious textbook it rips off. Both are about "how to do english proper" - how to write and speak in that mythical language called "correct English".

John Gingrich begins his article with the title: "20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Gets Wrong". It's not auspicious when an article on prescriptive language use gets it's language use wrong before the first paragraph. This is one of those titles that you only understand because you know the cliche that's being misused. Strictly speaking, I don't think it's even meaningful.

I was going to go through all the errors the author makes, but I just don't have the time or strength. In short though:

Of the 20 grammatical mistakes listed, 17 aren't grammatical at all - they're mistakes about the meanings of words, not the structure of sentences. And of these, four actually are mistakes:

"Moot" means 'open to discussion' or 'not yet decided', not 'irrelevant' or 'undecidable'.
"Affect" is a verb, "Effect" is a noun...plus a different verb. You can affect a person, which is to have an effect on that person, or to effect a change on them.
A "disinterested" experiment is one where the experimenters don't have a personal stake in the outcome. But a disinterested glance is pretty much the same as an "uninterested" glance.
A "continual" interruption happens frequently. A "continuous" noise happens only once but doesn't stop.

The rules about "Who" and "Whom" were never clear or consistent, and "Whom" hasn't been part of even high-register English for at least 50 years.

It is one of those cases where, if you were an educated young person a century ago, you learned one set of abstract rules in the classroom, and a completely different set of inconsistent rules for use everywhere else.

"Whom" in the classroom was for ablative personal pronouns, whereas outside it was for accusative, dative and sometimes relative third-person animate pronouns - in other words, it replaced "Him" and "Her" but not "He" and "She".

Just in case this is starting to make sense to you, remember that English was taught as though it were a coded form of Latin, and in Latin the dative case corresponds to the English prepositions "to" and "from", and the ablative to "by", "with" and "for". Except when it doesn't. However, in pre-Roman Latin "with" was the since-vanished instrumental case, and in modern English "to" is dative but "from" is ablative.

Perhaps if those old schoolmasters had remembered that English isn't derived from Latin at all but from Old High German, we'd have better grammar books now. Or not.

Gingrich thinks "'May' implies a possibility. 'Might' implies far more uncertainty". I've never heard this one before. "May" and "Might" are both auxiliary verbs indicating uncertainty, but "May" is also used for permission, which Gingrich doesn't even mention.

We may be early.
We might be early.
May I go?
You may go.

His carcrash of an explanation for "Which" and "That" manages to completely miss the point that "that" actually has four different meanings, one of which it shares with "Which" - to introduce clauses. And clauses are made subordinate or not with commas, not changing conjunctions as he seems to think.

The cars which were stolen crashed.
The cars, which were stolen, crashed.
The cars that were stolen crashed.
The cars, that were stolen, crashed.

The old pedentries of "Whether" and "If", "Fewer" and "Less", "Further" and "Father", "Since" and "Because" are there. And he declares that "Impactful" isn't a real word because, even though the readership understand it, someone made it up. Perhaps he thinks "Snafu", which he uses, wasn't invented by anyone?

I'm a teacher of English, and you know what makes my job most difficult? Stroppy students, moronic managers, terrible timekeeping?

Well yes. But apart from that, it's textbooks written by idiots who think real English is a bag of rules which a bunch of Victorian academics pulled out of their rectums to (seriously) give themselves a subject to teach. Books which can't even keep their imaginary rules straight, and can't follow them in the text.

That, and students who've read this rubbish and need deprogramming before I can teach them anything.

2012-02-01T01:01:00.000Z

“Dubito ergo cogito."

- Rene Descartes

2012-01-30T01:01:00.000Z

"Those who call for censorship in the name of the oppressed ought to recognize it is never the oppressed who determine the bounds of censorship."

- Aryeh Neier

Know Thyself

2012-01-29T14:10:00.000Z

According to Google's demographic algorithm, I'm an 18-24 year old male, into martial arts, shopping...and painting.

So I guess I'm a hipster, but only on the inside.

To find out who you aren't, click here, and see which ads google would put on your blog.

2012-01-29T01:01:00.000Z

"One thing about charlatans is that they have a fine-tuned sense of who might be hurting their bottom line."

- PZ Myers

2012-01-28T01:01:00.000Z

"England isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier."

- Gore Vidal

Material, Girl

2012-01-27T17:46:00.005Z

In the second slice of our philosophy sandwich, a case where the answers are often more baffling than the questions.

What's the relationship between the ideas in your head, and reality out there? What's the real world actually like, and how's it different from your thoughts, feelings, and impressions about it?

People have come up with hundreds of answers, but they generally fall into two broad camps, known as Materialism and Idealism. Both these words have meanings in ordinary language, but their philosophical meanings are quite different.

Materialism is the idea that reality is material, concrete, physical. It's external to and independent of anyone's perceptions of or beliefs about it - it doesn't care what you think, and would be just the same if you had no thoughts.

In materialism, thoughts are the processing of your corporeal brain, and anything we might call spiritual has a bodily foundation. Ghosts, god and precognition probably don't exist, but if they do, they're ultimately physical and scientifically investigatable.

This last leads into the notion that reality is also consistent, precisely defined, and exact - the opposite qualities to those we tend to find in ideas, which are often inconsistent, vague and shifting.

Idealism is the converse - the notion that reality is really mental, spiritual, or a matter of personal will.

Thus the idealisms that the universe is an idea in the mind of god, that geometric shapes are more real - because they're more perfect - than the imperfect shapes of mundane objects, or even that the physical world is an illusion, generated by my mind.

So surely everyone's a materialist now? Only lunatics believe idealism in the modern world, yes? Well...

Idealism is common in the new age movement, with self-help books written on how you can change your personal circumstances by visualising hard enough. You'll also hear sports commentators telling us that an athlete didn't win a race because 'they didn't want it enough'. Faith healers point to 'the placebo effect' to support their arguments about 'mind over matter'.

If you view history as a journey towards some goal, you're an idealist. If you think there's an essential, true version of your personality hidden underneath the layers of culture and conditioning, that's idealistic.

So what about the vagueness of thoughts? If thoughts are hazy and confused, wouldn't idealism mean that the world outside of thoughts is the same way? If your willpower determines your life, and your willpower is conflicted, won't that give you a life full of irreconcilable tensions?

Some have gone down just that road, citing quantum physics and chaos theory as evidence that the material world is as uncertain and blurry as human thoughts.

The confusing thing is that, once the terms have been explained, almost everyone calls themselves a philosophical materialist - redefining the term as needed to fit their idealisms. It's pretty rare to find someone who's consistently on one side or the other.

But is it possible to reconcile the two? To bring them into harmony, or show that the incompatibility is an illusion? Some great minds have tried.

In the late 1700s, Georg Hegel tried to reconcile his old religious idealism with the new scientific materialism - by folding the latter into the former. His system of a world spirit guiding the universe towards self-awareness, and humanity toward political perfection, made scientific progress a pawn of a divine plan. Incidentally, he also wrote his own philosophy into this plan - as the final stage.

Hegel was therefore not a reconciler at all but an idealist. However, his followers continued his work - most of them trying to reinterpret his system to make it materialist. In the case of Marx, that meant recasting Hegel's warring abstract cosmic forces as the conflicting political interests of earthly economic classes. And especially in the case of his sidekick Engels, projecting these conflicts into chemical reactions and gas nebulas.

In 1914, Lenin immersed himself in Hegel's writings. The result was a set of notes and essays which he kept secret from even his closest comrades. He set out his 'radical materialism', which counterposed 'vulgar materialism' with 'clerical obscurantism', ie. idealism. He contended that each was partially true but 'one sided', and the truth was a unity of both.

For Lenin, things and categories are pale reflections of each other, and in the reality behind them, the difference disappears. And experience is not matter stimulating the sense organs, but the mind's direct contact with matter.

Whatever else he was then, as a philosopher Lenin was a throwback to 18th century mysticism. His ultra-materialism, supposedly subsuming materialism and idealism...was an idealism.

And so I tentatively suggest that whenever anyone tries to reconcile or combine idealistic and materialistic views, the result is disguised idealism.

Happy Accident

2012-01-27T17:45:00.007Z

I missed the last philosophical phriday - I was actually caught up in a philosophical email discussion. So to make up, this week it's a double bill. In this the first part, an example of what's known as 'ordinary language philosophy'.

Is it possible to keep a promise by mistake?

When I first heard this one, I thought the answer was obviously yes. I mean, here's a scenario:

I promise to be in London on Tuesday, but have no intention of keeping the promise because I've already decided to be in Brighton on Tuesday. So on Tuesday I catch the train to Brighton...but it's the wrong train and I end up in London.

I promised to be in London, I made a mistake, and the result was I went to London, keeping the promise.

But it's not quite as simple as that. Because surely keeping a promise doesn't just involve getting the promised result, but also doing everything needed to get that result, and doing it with the intention of doing so.

There's plenty of verbs which refer to internal states - want, know, hope, calculate, remember etc. - but not to the visible expression of these states. And there's plenty of verbs which say nothing about what's going on 'inside' - robots can jump, roll and even speak without consciousness.

Can a robot be obnoxious? It could certainly be programmed to act like a jerk, but I don't think we'd describe it as being one. But the same robot programmed to play chess can win and lose games - it's not just pretending.

"Keep" though, in the sense of 'keep a promise', looks like it concerns both states and actions. And the same goes for making and breaking promises. Can you make a promise to someone by accident? You can certainly say something which they misinterpret as a promise, but that's a failure of communication, not an accidental intention. If you believe you've kept a promise to someone, but they maintain you've broken it, there may be disagreement about exactly what constitutes keeping and breaking, but they're not saying you did anything without meaning to.

In one sense, a bad egg can poison you, in that it can be the source of an infection. In another sense, the loved one who cooked you the bad egg in good faith has poisoned you, though they didn't mean to. But to be fully justified in accusing someone of poisoning you, they'd have to have correctly believed the egg was bad, and served it to you not just intending you to be ill as a result, but believing, perhaps falsely, that your lymphatic system couldn't just shrug it off.

The Russian noblemen who put poison in Rasputin's wine didn't succeed in poisoning him (killing him), even though they succeeded in...poisoning him (giving him poison).

Sometimes we use the same word for an action which is deliberate and one which isn't. It's possible to insult someone by mistake, and it's also possible to do it deliberately. Same word, different action.

It's possible to arrive on time by mistake, having intended to be late, but that's not the same as being punctual. It's possible to make someone feel complimented, when you intended to be sarcastic, but that's not the same as flattering them.

And it's possible to catch a train to the promised city having intended to go to a different one, but that's not the same as keeping a promise by mistake.

2012-01-27T01:01:00.000Z

"Whoever said laughter is the best medicine never had gonorrhea."

- Kat Likkel and John Hoberg.

2012-01-26T01:01:00.000Z

"If there is no stuggle inside you, it’s difficult to be an artist."

- Tariq Ali

2012-01-25T01:01:00.000Z

"If you look at the thing too directly - the oppressive social dimension - you don’t see it. You can see it in an oblique way only if it remains in the background."

- Slavoj Zizek

On Hold

2012-01-24T08:50:00.003Z

I was supposed to leave today.

That is, leave home, leave the UK, and leave state benefits for a job teaching arabs who want to learn American for business...but would rather learn it from a Britisher. Because Brits are seen as more refined than Yanks. The persistence of this small bit of student snobbery is largely what sustains the British ESL business.

However, there's been a small bureaucratic delay - of about four weeks. It seems the paperwork involved in setting up a business can't be processed at the same time as the paperwork for the visas of the employees of that business.

There's probably a reason for this rule which sound perfectly good if you don't think about it. But whatever the reason, I'm stuck here for another month - which on the one hand means I can learn a bit more Arabic and listen to a few more podcasts, and on the other...I can't do much more.

That's the thing about free time. You only have enough energy to fill a certain amount of it.

All the packing is planned, the least uncomfortable work clothes are pressed, I've got six months worth of diabetes pills, and a terabyte of movies, music and ebooks ready to go. But my guitar won't quite fit into my travelcase - typical.

2012-01-24T01:01:00.000Z

"Skepticism is not about disbelief, but about disbelief until sufficient evidence proves otherwise."

- Chuck Sonnenberg

2012-01-23T01:01:00.000Z

"If the hole is big enough, pegs of any shape will fit through."

- Harriet Hall

2012-01-22T01:01:00.000Z

"If we had to sum up the political view of our participants in a single sentence...we couldn’t. That’s sort of the point."

- Jon Stewart

2012-01-21T01:01:00.000Z

"Most issues rest on so many wrong premises and carry so many contradictions that instead of the question: 'Who is right?' one is constantly and tacitly confronted with the question: Which gang do you support?"

- Ayn Rand

2012-01-20T01:01:00.000Z

"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception."

- George Orwell

2012-01-19T01:01:00.001Z

"I am asked ‘What do you think of him?’ and my answer is ‘He doesn’t make me think.’"

- Christopher Hitchens

2012-01-18T01:01:00.001Z

"Beginners do not know what they do not know."

- Michael Heath

Killer Zodiac

2012-01-17T23:09:00.001Z

My starsign prediction, according to yahoo:

At the risk of being a bully, you've got to be assertive. A childhood dream is within your grasp, but you won't reach it unless you voice some demands. People will be shocked by your aggressive behaviour, but they don't have anything at stake. You, on the other hand, have the potential to get an incredible job, go on an overseas trip, or launch a successful business. Do you really want to jeopardise such an opportunity for the sake of being polite?

Oh crap.

The Captain's Table

2012-01-17T19:25:00.008Z

For my friends over at Infomanic: My riotous 40th birthday celebrations, with family.

The Haggis

The Vegetables

The Gravy

The Strawberry Cheesecake

The, er, "Glass" of Wine

The First Helping

The Distressingly Modest Second Helping

The Bowl of Something Mysterious That'd Been Left on the Table

The First Helping of Cheesecake

Um. Actually I'm too full of Haggis to have the cheesecake just yet. And so are my parents. We're having a little lie down for half an hour before attempting to tackle the Pudding.

Update when we have the strength.

Update: A Small Portion of Cheesecake

Foreword, Foreward, Forty

2012-01-17T01:10:00.000Z

Some people say life begins at forty.

But these people are usually over sixty and have no life. If you turn a stupid idea on its head - like turning youth-worship into age-worship - you just get another stupid idea. Like replacing racism with political correctness, or universal brotherhood with universal misanthropy.

At age 10 I wanted to be an actor. At 15, a pop star. At 20, a philosopher. At 25 I just wanted to find a relationship that wasn't messed up. At 30, I wanted to be an exposer of frauds everywhere - so I suppose I wanted to be James Randi.

At 35...I knew what I didn't want to be any longer - the guy who fixes everyone else's computers. I also didn't want to be 'the out gay one' or the one who feels obliged to fit in. Somehow this translated into training as a teacher - and becoming an unemployed teacher instead of an unemployed technician.

Now, turning 40, I'm supposed to look back and ponder, so I can look forward and plan. I'm also supposed to have one last fling, a favourite pair of slippers, a life partner, a life insurance policy and no new thoughts ever again.

Well, I'll try for the planning bit:

What to do: All sorts of stuff. Music, reading, writing, a bit of travel, trying out whatever seems interesting. Also, lose some weight and be less broke.
What not to do: What everyone else my age is doing. Settling down, getting married, getting a mortgage with a patio and french windows. Believing the newspapers and pretending to understand politics. Also, prevaricate.
What to be: I'll let you know when I've worked this one out.
What not to be: Bored, regretful, fearful.

So there you have it. I know pretty well what I don't want to do with my life. If I have any wisdom at all, that's it.

Suite Incense

2012-01-17T01:05:00.001Z

One day I found a videotape.

We postgrad students had a 'common room', ie. a cluttered, smoke infused room for general storage of whatever things didn't have storage space of their own...plus some chairs.

Under one heap of stuff, I found an unmarked VHS video cassette. And on an impulse decided, "Whatever's recorded on this tape, I'll re-edit into...something."

The tape contained four short, silent films, made by a previous student. They were dance-based, used christian imagery, and had not so much a gay subtext as a gay...text.

I quickly put together four bits of simple music - including one of my first attempts at rapping, called 'Heretic' - and worked out some permutative algoithms to edit the video to.

The result was "The Incense of the World", a pun on "The Sense of the World" - an impenetrable postmodern art criticism book by Jean-Luc Nancy, that we were all supposed to pretend to have read. That and, er, religeous incense.

Now over a decade later, having a masters degree in art history hasn't notably improved my life. But the incidental byways in the process of getting the qualification...they're worth having.

2012-01-17T01:01:00.000Z

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers."

- Thomas Pychon

Suite FA

2012-01-16T16:49:00.000Z

This was my attempt at a video self-portrait.

So it's a little slow, occasionally jerky, and just a bit pretentious.

2012-01-16T01:01:00.000Z

"The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt it."

- Internet Rule #43

2012-01-15T01:01:00.000Z

"Any sound that the human ear can hear can be produced by a computer."

- Max Matthews

Suite's from Strangers

2012-01-14T17:00:00.000Z

This editing experiment I did at home - and made the music for it too.

Back in 2000, computers were just powerful enough to record fullscreen video in real time, and the software was just powerful enough to manipulate the result in ways that immediately became cheesy cliches.

So, using my usual technique of recording whatever was on the screen at the time and then seeing what I could do with it, this was all done in one afternoon, a burst of enthusiasm, and possibly a fit of pique.

2012-01-14T01:01:00.000Z

"There’s nothing like the lonely horror of realising you’ve made a really massive cock-up."

- Charlie Brooker

Timber!

2012-01-13T20:30:00.000Z

I did write a long, complicated post for this, the second Philosophical Phriday, but it threatened to turn into a book. So here's a nice simple one instead.

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound? We've all heard the question, and it's not difficult to see that it relies on an ambiguous use of the word "sound".

If sound is defined as longitudinal waves of compression and rarefaction in a medium - specifically, such waves that are capable of creating sympathetic vibrations in the eardrum, then the answer is yes. The tree makes a sound, but no one hears it.

If sound is defined experientally as what a person hears when their brain interprets impulses from their cochleas, fed to it by the eardrum, moving in sympathetic vibration to waves which hit it...then the answer is no. There was no sound because there was no experience of sound.

If you like, you can locate the boundary between "physical signal" and "personal experience" as taking place in various stages - the movement of air inside the ear, the movement of the eardrum, the transmission of this to the cochlea, the reception by the cochlea, the bandwidth splitting that it performs, the reception of "raw" signal by the brain...or the moment where your conscious minds says "Aha! A sound!".

I think where you draw the line (or lines) is largely a matter of taste. The important thing is that the word "sound" has (at least) two senses either side of the line, and conflating them leads to confusion.

In fact, as Wittgenstein was fond of saying, most philosophical questions stem from this kind of carelessness with language.

This one also threatened to turn into a book, so I've kept what was essentially the preamble, to follow up on the trailing threads in later posts.

2012-01-13T01:01:00.000Z

"The irrational belongs to all of us."

- Johnathan Meades

Suite Love

2012-01-12T13:30:00.001Z

That film studies course. Which was actually called "Historical and Theoretical Studies", a name only exceeded in vagueness by the degree course it led into, "Visual Culture".

Anyway, it involved watching:

Jean-Luc ~~Picard~~ Goddard's "Weekend" - or rather, the famous ten minute long tracking shot of a traffic jam.
François Truffaut's "Jules et Jim" - a bromance movie from before the word existed. Two men who are obviously in one kind of love or another, channeling it through a woman.
Citizen Kane. Which I think is more interesting to watch as a composition exercise than a story.

I of course spent most of my time messing around with the antiquated video editing facilities, and here's the second experiment. The music is the "Three Fingers" version of The Art of Noise's famous "Moments in Love", and the visuals are...a lot of home taped documentaries, grabbed at random the night before.

No Goddard, Truffaut or Welles, though.

2012-01-12T01:01:00.000Z

"History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other."

- Arthur Balfour

Suite Blitz

2012-01-11T13:30:00.000Z

Would you like to see my home videos?

Around the year 2000, I was on a Film Studies course. Aside from watching (and re-watching, and reading about, and reading more about, and trying to write about) a series of classic movies...there were some editing suites.

The kind that worked by copying sections of one VHS tape onto another - obsolete and clunky even at the time, I spent far too long experimenting on them with whatever source material came to hand.

So here's the first of my experiments to survive. The soundtrack is an untitled track from the end of Yello's "One Second" album, and the video is recut from a film called "Swoon", about Leopold and Loeb.

If you don't remember the case, they were gay jewish intellectuals (and sort-of lovers) who tried to prove their superiority by committing the perfect crime - kidnapping a young boy, killing him and purposely leaving clues...for the police to miss.

The irony is, the duo left plenty of non-deliberate clues, and the police caught them easily. The case has inspired several other films, including Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope".

So, we'll see what YouTube makes of the copyright issues, and if they yank it after a week, well, you've still got a brief snippet of film studies.

2012-01-11T01:01:00.000Z

"Glory is a retrospective and sentimental adjustment of the actual. It’s like dressing an accident victim for his coffin."

- Johnathan Meades

2012-01-10T01:01:00.000Z

"Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every man has a right to knock him down for it."

- Samuel Johnson

2012-01-09T01:01:00.000Z

"We expect more from technology and less from each other."

- Sherry Turkle

2012-01-08T01:01:00.000Z

"Fiction is a branch of neurology."

- JG Ballard

Taxy!

2012-01-07T16:57:00.001Z

Today I calculated my income tax. You're bored already, aren't you?

Eighteen months ago I became a small business - teaching English as a second language. Six months later I had four students - one ran out of money for lessons, one offered me a great job...then very suddenly left the country and cancelled his phone. Hmmm. One got depressed and decided he couldn't handle the grammar...and the forth decided she didn't need to learn English at all.

I'd asked her "Why do you want to improve your English?", and as she answered I could see her realising that all her colleagues spoke Arabic, as did all her clients and her friends. She could get through an entire month in England using English for nothing more than buying groceries.

In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have asked. But it's an accepted fact of teaching adults - easily half your students don't really know why they're studying at all, even though they may be learning it well.

Anyway, sole trader income tax.

Ninety minutes of fiddling around with the government website - which is to say, ten minutes guessing which of the several twelve-digit random streams they'd given me a year and a half ago was my login ID. Then another ten getting my password reset, and ten clicking indecipherably-named links until I got to the right page.

And then an hour of filling out an online questionnaire. Am I a farmer? No. Am I or my spouse or legal partnership partner registered blind? Uh, no. Do I have Class Four Exemption? Seeing as I don't know what that is, probably not.

What are my costs? Well, ignoring the occasional biro and notepaper - which the student usually has lying around anyway - erm, nothing at all. Not office rental, no company car, not even a lavish restaurant meal with an 'agent' which can be put on expenses.

And income? When I set up the business, I was emphatically told I must keep all receipts from all transactions. And that's why I've had twelve receipts for short courses and individual lessons sitting safe in a ringbinder for a year.

Together coming to...a bit less than GBP400.

So I can now reveal exactly how much tax I have to pay. In round figures. The roundest figures which exist, in fact. The Arabic word is 'Sifr', from which we get the English words 'Cypher' and 'Zero'.

There's just one other thing. I can't find the form for closing down my business. It seems that, having died in the world of business, I don't know how to commit business suicide.

2012-01-07T01:01:00.000Z

"What we desire is not a happy ending, so much as closure."

- Roger Ebert

Bull by the Horns

2012-01-06T10:06:00.001Z

You might find it difficult to believe, but this blog started, seven years ago, as a place to put essays on philosophy.

After four rather laboured posts, I thought "I'm not actually any good at this, but I do have a real life - so I'll write about that instead", deleted the essays and started again.

I'd also discovered the philosophical aspect of marxism, which seemed to neatly cut through all the imponderables and knotty questions I spent my teens and twenties bashing my head against.

Now though, I've belatedly realised that:
(1) the philosophy is 19th century hermetic mysticism.
(2) It's rubbish.
(2) It's actually nothing to do with the political project of marxism, and
(3) However insightful the project's other theories may be, it's moribund.

So, I'm picking up some of my old books again, and I'm setting myself the task of writing one informal philosophically inspired essay per week - perhaps on Philosophical Phridays. And we'll see where it goes.

Starting with one of my favourite topics.

"On Bullshit" is a 1986 essay by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. He treats bullshit as a verb rather than a noun. Instead of asking "What is bullshit?", he asks "What is it to bullshit someone?"

His answer is that it's to attempt to persuade, without caring whether the argument is sound, logical or even meaningful. That means it's quite possible to bullshit someone with nothing but clear, reasoned arguments based on evident truths. But it's equally possible to use half-truths, emotive language, empty cliches, appeal to authority, intimidating technical terms, insinuation...or just plain lies.

A bullshitter is someone who doesn't care about truth or the ethics of debate - if the truth is useful, they'll use it, but they'll try to win by any methods available.

The obvious examples are advertising and politics. An advertiser might truthfully claim that users of toothpaste brand X have 66% fewer cavities than the average, according to a recent study - while failing to mention the study had a grand total of three subjects, and had to be done 50 times to get the result they wanted. An election candidate might constantly mention that their competitor was once accused of adultery - as though the accusation proved guilt, and as though it somehow related to the competitor's competence.

So, is it possible to bullshit oneself? Frankfurt doesn't ask, but there seems no reason why not. Indeed, we've all watched people take a few seconds to invent rationalisations after they've realised what they're doing or saying is wrong. People are actually very squeamish about violating their ethics, so they avoid the problem by building their ethics out of rubber.

But is it bullshit to use violence or the threat of violence? What about threatening someone with financial ruin if they don't join your ponzi scheme? Or eternal damnation if they don't join your religion? That's certainly persuasion.

Indeed, what about threatening to stab someone if they don't give you their money? A mugger may be lying about their willingness to use a knife, but it's difficult to describe being robbed as being bullshitted.

What about actually being stabbed? What about torturing detainees to "persuade" them to tell what they know?

Again, Frankfurt doesn't go there, but there is a crucial implicit distinction - between being persuaded, by whatever means, to believe something, and being persuaded, by possibly identical means, to do something.

The ponzi seller and the preacher both use threats and promises to try to make you believe you should join their scheme, but you may or may not act on that belief. The interrogators don't really care what you believe - they just want you to tell them what they think they already know, and not resist whichever government is in power at the time.

To borrow terms from a different philosopher - Louis Althusser - bullshit is ideological, as opposed to repressive.

But the distinction isn't entirely clear cut, for two reasons:
(1) There'd be no point in changing someone's belief if that didn't sometimes change their behavior as a result. Frankfurt says bullshit is everywhere, but doesn't go on to say that the only reason it's everywhere, is that people who want you to do things for them are everywhere.

(2) It's emotion, not belief, that moves us. And the reason people sometimes act on their beliefs is that beliefs are intimately mixed up with feelings. The advertiser doesn't want you to believe the product is effective - they want you to desire it, for whatever reason, even if you believe it's ineffective. So much that you'll buy it. How often have you bought something which you knew wouldn't do its job as well as a competitor, but felt a kind of loyalty to?

To be bullshitted is to have your emotional buttons pushed - including buttons connected to your feelings about truth, rigour and logic. In fact, I suggest that Harry Frankfurt had it the wrong way round: The bullshitter doesn't bullshit us into believing. Rather, they bullshit us into feeling, hoping this will lead to us acting, with beliefs later catching up with both as a by-product.

2012-01-06T01:01:00.000Z

"The problem of evil is not hedonism. The problem is that of envy, when preventing the other’s enjoyment becomes more important than your own enjoyment. The logic of envy has nothing to do with hedonism."

- Slavoj Zizek

2012-01-05T01:01:00.000Z

"It is much easier to have sympathy for suffering than for thought."

- Oscar Wilde

2012-01-04T01:01:00.000Z

"Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit."

- XKCD

2012-01-03T01:01:00.001Z

"If you're not comfortable with the unknown, it's difficult to be a scientist."

- Brian Cox

2012-01-03T01:01:00.000Z

"Silence means something or doesn't mean something in a particular context."

- John P Meier

2012-01-02T01:01:00.000Z

"Beauty’s where you find it."

- Madonna

Resolutions

2012-01-01T01:15:00.000Z

So, it's the new year.

I've been on the earth for around 350,000 hours, and with any luck there's about the same again to come. What am I supposed to do with it?

In seventeen days (assuming I don't get hit by a bus) I'm turning forty.

In about twenty five days (assuming bureaucracy doesn't screw up again) I'm catching a plane to take a job teaching in the arse end of nowhere.

And in six months I'm scheduled (assuming...I stick the the schedule) to decide whether I want to stay there for another six.

So I suppose I do have a plan for the next year. Become (apparently) middle-aged, be gainfully employed, try to save a lot of money while having some new experiences, and at some point catch a plane to somewhere else.

But apart from that...

All those intriguing stray thoughts which crop up, the one which make you think "I wonder if there's a witty or incisive blogpost in that"...before you think "Hmmm, maybe I'd offend or confuse or bore my army of casual readers, so I'll play safe and keep quiet".

Quick film reviews, a weekly series on abstruse philosophical topics, things which were blindingly obvious but which I'd never fully appreciated before. That kind of thing - blog it.
Have a go at video blogging. Without ever showing my face.

What's the worst that could happen? Or to put it another way, what could possibly go wrong?
Just make some fucking music already. It doesn't have to be lyrically profound, or tonally inventive, or genre breaking.

The band who first made me want to make music - the Art of Noise, back in 1985 - described their avant-garde noodling as "high tech skiffle". And that's good enough for me.

But before all that...try getting to sleep before seven in the morning. Maybe not every night, but at least once a week.

2012-01-01T01:01:00.000Z

"We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it."

- Kenneth Tynan

2011-12-31T00:01:00.000Z

"You simply cannot solve problems that you do not want to identify."
- Dierdrie Walker

2011-12-30T00:01:00.001Z

"That’s the problem with nature – it’s never natural enough."
- Mark Simpson

2011-12-29T00:01:00.001Z

"Freedom of Press is limited to those who own one."
- HL Menken

2011-12-28T00:01:00.001Z

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair

2011-12-27T00:01:00.001Z

"Silence is consent."
- Paul Haggis

2011-12-26T00:01:00.001Z

"I’m English, and as such I crave disappointment"
- Bill Bailey

2011-12-25T00:01:00.001Z

"It is impossible to obtain a conviction for sodomy from an English jury. Half of them don’t believe that it can physically be done, and the other half are doing it."
- Winston Churchill

Twelve Fails of Christmas

2011-12-24T23:11:00.006Z

Holidays.

These are periods of a few days or weeks, which you set aside and plan ahead to enjoy yourself. In the event you probably don't enjoy it, but you take some photos to look at later and tell yourself you did.

But there are two kinds of holidays. Ones where you go somewhere new, meet new people and try out new things. And ones where you stay at home (or go home), spend a long time with people you already know quite well enough...and eat too much.

Christmas...is the second kind.

So once you've eaten enough turkey and chocolates to feed a small African country, exchanged giftwrapped socks with distant cousins, made smalltalk with people you normally avoid because of their tedious smalltalk, and got slightly drunk on that bottle of special liquer that's been sitting on a shelf since last year...what is there to do?

Watch TV. Always a favourite.

Watch a DVD.

Read a book.

Practice the guitar. (Which I've been meaning to do.)

Have some friends over.

Catch up on sleep.

Wake yourself up with a refreshing shower.

Or a bath.

A big, luxurious bath.

Have a beer. Always a reliable time-filler. (Even though I hate beer.)

Put up the decorations.

Potter around on the computer. Write a blog post or something - and maybe find a use for some of those pictures which have been cluttering up your hard drive.

Guess which one I did?

So, have a happy Hannukah, prosperous Kwanzaa, merry Festival of Saturn, enjoyable Winter Solstice...or a Noodly Holiday if you're feeling geeky. Anything but christmas.

2011-12-24T00:01:00.001Z

"Without humor, a sports fan is a religious fanatic."
- Keith Olbermann

2011-12-23T00:01:00.001Z

"The fact that capitalism is not just, far from being something which makes it more intolerable, is precisely what makes it palpable for the majority. What makes it palpable is its very injustice, and that we knwow it’s unjust."
- Slavoj Zizek

2011-12-22T00:01:00.001Z

"Americans are brought up from childhood to have no curiosity about anything, because they might not like the answer."
- Gore Vidal

Happy, not Clappy

2011-12-21T19:25:00.003Z

Aimee blogged, asking what benefits her atheism has over religious faith.

I wrote a response, which grew into a small essay, which I thought worth posting.

"Sometimes i still wonder though, whether i am really any better off now as a non-believer than i was as a believer."

I think it depends exactly what you mean by atheism. To me, there seem to be three common senses, which often get mixed up in people's heads - including atheistic heads:

1) Not believing in a cosmic tyrant - who sees all, knows all, and judges all according to some arbitrary (and inconsistent) moral code.

2) Not believing in anything supernatural or incredible - ghosts, reincarnation, telepathy, the illuminati, shapeshifting alien lizards, time travel etc. At least, until some decent evidence comes along, in which case they're no longer fantasy.

3) Believing that, if a problem is genuine and actually has a solution, whether it's theoretical or practucal, empirical or moral, reason can find it, given sufficient evidence and opportunity.

The third position is a kind of faith, and might be identified with humanism.

Specifically, it's faith based (inductively) on good but not perfect evidence - as opposed to faith based on no evidence, or weak evidence, or actually opposing the evidence. I wrote a lot of paragraphs about different kinds of faith, which I'll spare you.

It obviously can't be proven that every possible real problem is rationally soluble, but given the vast evidence, it's inductively very likely.

You're asking what benefits atheism has. I'd turn it around and ask what harm religion does.

An atheist in the first sense is free to live without the fear of an invisible abusive parent in the sky. They live without cosmic Stockholm syndrome.

The real world is a scary enough place, without inventing invincible demonic versions of real cultural barriers. Atheism here doesn't exactly make you happy, but it does make you less sad, and less scared.

An atheist in the second sense is a skeptic, or a rationalist - someone who's cautious about what they believe, and so isn't easy to fool or con. Again, skeptics don't always make great decisions, but they make fewer foolish ones.

GK Chesterton made a famous remark that ceasing to believe in god left one open to any other belief. It's quite possible to be an atheist in my first sense, but a gullible believer in my second.

I think the third position is, by definition, rationalism - in the broad, lower case sense, as opposed to the continental philosophy sense.

It may indeed not provide the pleasant fuzzy sensations of an imaginary friend, but as soon as you're required to make a practical decision, it's a lot more reliable.

Finally, there are plenty of sources of spiritual nourishment that don't involve irrational belief, so the unbeliever is left far from starving. Music, literature, film and theater are I find quite sufficient, and come with fewer strings attached. And let's not forget friendship, love and indeed sex.

So in short: Atheism doesn't make you happy, but it does make you sensible, and there's plenty of other things to make you happy.

2011-12-21T00:01:00.001Z

"Go the whole hog, be bigger than god."
- John Lydon

Touched by the Hand

2011-12-20T21:23:00.003Z

Touch screen technology - a solution waiting for a problem.

I tried it two years ago when I got a new phone. It was sleek, powerful, and an absolute pig to operate. After three days I took it back to the shop and swapped it for one with lower specifications - crappy camera, no ebook reading facility, very limited video viewing, sort-of but not-really MMS ability.

But it was actually usable, and the lack of such 'selling points' as mp3 ringtones, secondary camera and en-suite video editing wasn't an issue because, well, what kind of person buys a phone because it can play last months chart-topper instead of ringing?

However, that contract has nearly expired so...I've got a new one. With QWERTY keyboard for writing my novel, android apps for mapreading, and a 5 megapixel camera that can shoot video at 720x480 and 30 frames per second. In other words...DVD!

It's a frelling camera phone, and it can make movies of up to 2 hours in domestic DVD quality. Or rather it could...if it had a good quality lens. Is it me, or is that combination of overkill and cheap design a bit mad?

This new phone can read PDFs, and other ebook formats. It's got a second camera facing me so I can put video diaries on Youtube. There's an option to upload photos to Flikr immediately upon taking them...before I even review them. Whose idea was that?

It's got a special dedicated button for connecting to bloody Facebook. That alone speaks volumes about what the designers think about and of the target audience.

The battery life is two days - one third of my old phone. Oh, and it's got possibly the naffest name of any phone ever: The Cha Cha. Yes.

All of which I can happily live with. But the touchscreen aspect isn't as peripheral as the advertising copy suggested. It's absolutely central, and there's almost no keyboard alternative - which would be usually faster.

Imagine your computer didn't have a mouse, but you clicked and moved things by putting on a boxing glove and rubbing it around the screen. Gloves aren't precise, so to click anything you need to keep dabbing at the screen until it decides you've hit the right spot. And then you drag a slider up or down to where you want it, except you have to guess because you can't see the slider because...the fucking glove's in the way.

Look, technology doesn't advance by identifying problems and finding solutions. It advances by finding new things it can do, and then casting about for applications.

X-rays weren't discovered by someone looking for ways to diagnose bone fractures - they were a mysterious new wave that got beamed at anything and everything to see what happened, for decades. It was marketed as everything from a baldness cure to a replacement for the telegraph.

Nuclear fission still doesn't have a safe application, but it's still being pushed as an expensive and risky way to run steam turbines. If you think nuclear energy is green, ask yourself what infrastructure it relies on.

Electricity was a lab-bound curiosity for decades. Now we're so reliant in it, civilisation would collapse without it.

You can now get laptops with touchscreen capability - the new super gee-wiz version of the mouse. The one that doesn't work as well as the mouse, and gives you different, worse types of repetitive strain injury.

I've watched software engineers wax lyrical about how touchscreen will enable users to interact with the computers in whole new ways. But they never, ever, speculate what these new ways might be.

Hey, maybe there are uses for touchscreen that keyboards, speech recognition, Kinect, tracker balls and mouses (mice, meese, moose) can't do. There's just been no sign of them yet.

As for my new handset, it's got a full keyboard which might come in handy, occasionally useful apps, a pretty good camera, and I can read miniature books on it.

For everything else - music and audiobooks, battery life and, erm, talking to people on the phone, the old handset is actually superior. So I'll probably be moving the sim card over to it, having effectively signed a two year contract and got a free micro-palmtop.

Oh, and the old handset I bought two years ago: it was obsolete at the time.

2011-12-20T00:01:00.001Z

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
- HL Mencken

2011-12-19T00:01:00.001Z

"Well, an idea is an idea. The present one may be right and it may be wrong. One thing is quite certain: that no progress will be made against it by denouncing it as merely immoral."
- HL Mencken

2011-12-18T00:01:00.001Z

"Serious matters seldom break through to cliché-ridden minds."
- Gore Vidal

2011-12-17T00:01:00.001Z

"The Church essentially exists to convince the proletariat to accept its lowly earthly lot while taking its money."
- Shawn Baker

2011-12-16T00:01:00.002Z

"We ought to be suspicious of something that we very much want to believe."
- John Searle

2011-12-15T00:01:00.001Z

"If a culture stops allowing people the right to fail, that culture will die."
- Tariq Ali

Hey Kids, Don't Do Drugs

2011-12-14T08:00:00.000Z

You remember I got hold of some legal drugs to see if they gave me some much needed energy? And you remember how I came over a bit weird?

Well they come in packs of two, and I found the other one, and took it just to see what would happen. They're called 'Speed Freak Ultra', but seeing as all "herbal supplements" have over the top brand names, I didn't think much of it.

It's seven in the morning, and I have just spent five hours being...intense. Specifically:

* Dry mouth

* Thirst

* Stomach cramps

* Being rather too wide awake

* Not exactly a headache but a kind of pressure from inside the temples.

* Having a desperate sexual craving. I've been known to have a fair sexual appetite sometimes, but I've never before spent five solid hours thinking obsessively about penises. Sucking and swallowing. Not even when I was thirteen.

* Having no physiological sexual response whatsoever. My nipples have been sensitive ever since I was nineteen when a deeply strange man showed me what they were for. Tonight: slightly less responsive than the average toenail.

As for traces of erection...or that sickly sweet feeling you get near your bladder for which there doesn't seem to be word. Or those tingles you sometimes get radiating outward from your groin. Not a hint.

It's probably good I was alone, as I'd most likely have been a complete pain to any company - though possibly less wall-climbingly frustrated.

It can be fun to mess with your own head. But I don't think I'll be doing this again. Some experiences are for remembering rather than having.

2011-12-14T00:01:00.001Z

"A low budget is almost always a release."
- Tilda Swinton

2011-12-13T00:01:00.002Z

"If you want people to do wicked things, you need religion."
- Christopher Hitchens

Everybody Likes Like

2011-12-12T16:09:00.001Z

How many of the things you do for pleasure...actually give you pleasure?

Holidays? Famously stressful. There's something about paying to be in unfamiliar surroundings that makes families want to kill each other.

Friends? Be honest - how many of your friends are annoying people you've got into the habit of tolerating, but you've forgotten why?

Sporting events? Ninety minutes of watching highly trained minor celebrities simulate violent sex with each other, with occasional minutes of excitement when they, erm, 'score'.

Sex (violent or otherwise)? There's something rather deflating about letting someone try to make you substitute for their fantasy, in the hope they can subsitute for yours.

TV? I've often caught myself checking the clock to see how long it'll be till the programme ends and I can do something else. Since when was mindless entertainment a timetabled chore?

Music? How often do you put on some favourite music, and after ten minutes realise you've been ignoring the music while reading your emails?

Chocolate? If the taste is so good, why are you so keen to swallow that piece and start on the next?

If you really do enjoy any of these things, then fine. But I've come to the conclusion that everyone should take a long hard look at their list of enjoyments every few years, and prune it down to things they do enjoy - as opposed to things they used to enjoy, or only tell themselves they enjoy, or think they ought to enjoy.

And when we've all done that, we can ask the next question.

How many of the things you do to gain approval...acutally get you approval?

2011-12-12T00:01:00.001Z

"All I ask is that you be consistent with your bullshit."
- Chuck Sonnenberg

2011-12-11T00:01:00.002Z

"Stop organising your life around people who don’t get the joke."
- Laurence O’Donnell

Words and Numbers 2

2011-12-10T21:33:00.001Z

How many words with ten syllables does English have?

According to my wordlist (extracted from the digital version of the 1997 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) the answer is: None

But it's not a simple as that, because it lists "floccinaucinihilipilification" (the act of estimating something to be valueless) with seven vowels or vowel+glide pairs, and thus seven syllables. Except I make it eleven.

"Praetertransubstantiationalism" is a word from catholic theology that I learned in seminary. I still don't know exactly what it means, but I reckon it's also got eleven syllables. It's not in the SOED.

Everyone's favourite pointlessly long word - "Antidisestablishmentarianisn" - isn't in there either, but I think it's got twelve syllables. Likewise "Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" (a disease of the lungs) is absent but, by my reckoning, has sixteen.

I can sort-of pronounce "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" (nineteen syllables), mainly because my father lived there in the first world war.

Some people stick extra schwa vowels into words to make them easier to pronounce. Others glide adjacent vowels together, or skip over entire syllables. The two longest common surnames in Britain are "Cholmondalay" and "Featherstonehaugh" - pronounced (and often respelled) "Chumley" and "Fanshaw".

So, still no dectasyllablical squipidalianisms, but the SOED lists eight words with nine syllables. See how many syllables you say them with:

Reticuloendothelial (9)
Arteriosclerosis (I make it 7, probably)
Extraterritoriality (9)
Immunoelectrophoresis (9)
Otorhinolaryngology (9)
Polytetrafluoroethylene (9)
Propionibacterium (8)
Stachybotryotoxicosis (9)

2011-12-10T00:01:00.001Z

"Your enemies form you much more than your friends."
- John P Meier

2011-12-09T00:01:00.002Z

"A is for Beginning"
- Paul Morley

Words and Numbers

2011-12-08T17:08:00.002Z

English has 441 nouns that are pronounced the same in the plural as the singular. Most of them seem to be from the French, and I understand maybe a dozen of them. Here they are:

Abonnement	Adage	Affaire
Agacerie	Allée	Allure
Amende	Andouille	Andouillette
Arc-Boutant	Arrière-Pensée	Arriviste
Arrondissement	Assemblé	Assemblée
Aubusson	Aumônière	Auteur
Auvergnat	Avoué	Bagarre
Bagne	Bahut	Baignoire
Balancé	Ballon	Ballonné
Batterie	Béguin	Bénitier
Berceuse	Bergère	Bêtise
Bevue	Biberon	Bibliothèque
Bidon	Biftek	Blagueur
Blanc	Blancbec	Blanquette
Boîte	Bondieuserie	Bouchée
Boulevardier	Bouleversement	Bourgade
Briquet	Brisé	Brouillon
Cache-Peigne	Café	Café
Cafetière	Cagot	Cagoulard
Cahier	Camaieu	Carmagnole
Carrefour	Causerie	Causeuse
Ceinture	Chaîné	Chaise
Chambranle	Changement	Chanson
Chanteuse	Chasse-Marée	Chassepot
Chateaubriand	Chaton	Chaussée
Chevalet	Chevelure	Cheville
Chiffonnier	Civet	Clochard
Cohue	Comble	Comédie
Compotier	Comptoir	Conférencier
Confrérie	Consigne	Conte
Convenance	Coureur	Couvert
Crémaillère	Crise	Croûte
Culotte	Curé	Dalle
Danseur	Danseuse	Débat
Débouché	Découpage	Dégringolade
Délassement	Démêlé	Démenti
Demi-Vierge	Développé	Diseuse
Dot	Drageoir	Ébauche
Ébéniste	Éboulement	Échevin
Échevin	Éclaircissement	Écrevisse
Élégante	Élève	Éloge
Embarras	Embusqué	Émeute
Émincé	Enceinte	Enchaînement
Encoignure	Enfantillage	Engouement
Engrenage	Entremet	Épanchement
Épaulement	Épicerie	Équipe
Érudit	Escargot	Esclandre
Esquisse	Estacade	Estafette
Estaminet	Estouffade	Étalage
Étang	Étourderie	Étrenne
Externat	Extincteur	Fanchon
Fauteuil	Faux-Bourdon	Félibre
Féra	Fillette	Filtre
Fine	Flacon	Flâneur
Flèche	Fontange	Fourgon
Fourniture	Friandise	Friseur
Frondeur	Galère	Garçon
Garconnière	Gare	Gargouillade
Garigue	Gavroche	Gilet
Girouette	Gîte	Glissé
Goûter	Grognard	Guérite
Guinguette	Hausse	Hausse-Col
Homme	Horizontale	Incroyable
Inédit	Intermède	Jabot
Japonaiserie	Jongleur	Jour
Lacet	Laisse	Lande
Langue	Lettre	Livraison
Loup	Madrier	Magnanerie
Mail	Maillot	Maire
Mairie	Maison	Maître
Maîtresse	Majorat	Mamelière
Manchette	Manoir	Marigot
Marmiton	Marotte	Marouflage
Marsouin	Mascaret	Mâtin
Médaillon	Messagerie	Métairie
Métayer	Milice	Militaire
Millefeuille	Minaudière	Minot
Miroton	Mitrailleur	Mitrailleuse
Morgue	Mortier	Motard
Mouchard	Moule	Naïveté
Nécessaire	Nef	Négociant
Névé	Noceur	Non
Nouille	Nounou	Nouvelle
Objet	Oeillade	Oeuvre
Orage	Ouvert	Ouvreuse
Palmier	Palourde	Parapluie
Paratonnerre	Parfumerie	Parisienne
Parloir	Partage	Particule
Partie	Partouse	Patronne
Paysage	Paysanne	Pelouse
Pensionnaire	Pensionnat	Peulvan
Piedroit	Pignon	Pinard
Piou-Piou	Piqueur	Piqûre
Place	Plaidoyer	Plaisanterie
Planh	Plat	Plié
Plongeur	Pochoir	Poêlée
Point	Pointe	Poissarde
Poitrinaire	Policier	Polisson
Politique	Pomme	Popote
Portefeuille	Porteur	Portière
Post-Chaise	Potiche	Potin
Poudreuse	Poule	Poupée
Pourboire	Pourparler	Pousse-Café
Praire	Pré-Salé	Presbytère
Primeur	Procédé	Procureur
Projet	Prolonge	Provocateur
Puy	Quartier	Quillon
Quincaillerie	Quinton	Raccourci
Rafale	Raisonneur	Rapide
Rasta	Rastaquouère	Raté
Ratelier	Ravalement	Razet
Réchaud	Récit	Réclame
Récolte	Rédacteur	Reflet
Régie	Régisseur	Reglement
Relâche	Relance	Religieuse
Remaniement	Remboîtage	Remueur
Renseignement	Rente	Rentier
Réplique	Repoussoir	Résistant
Retiré	Retraite	Réveillon
Reverdie	Revirement	Rognon
Roman	Rôtisseur	Rouget
Roulement	Routier	Routinier
Royale	Salaud	Salmi
Salut	Sanglier	Saucier
Saucisson	Saut	Séjour
Servante	Sévigné	Signifiant
Signifié	Singerie	Sirop
Sirvente	Snobisme	Sociétaire
Soigneur	Solfège	Sommité
Sottise	Sottisier	Soubise
Soubresaut	Soubresaut	Souffre-Douleur
Soupe	Souper	Soupirant
Sous-Entendu	Souteneur	Spectacle
Strapontin	Suisse	Tabac
Tabagie	Tabatière	Taille
Tailleur	Tastevin	Tâtonnement
Tendre	Tendresse	Terrasse
Thé	Tian	Tirage
Tomme	Tonnelle	Tonton
Tourmente	Traiteur	Tranche
Tricoteuse	Tripot	Trouvaille
Urinoir	Vague	Veillée
Veilleuse	Vendange	Vendeuse
Vernissage	Vespasienne	Vie
Viguier	Vin	Virage
Viveur	Vivier	Voyant
Voyou	Vraisemblance	Vulgarisateur

I can reveal this fascinating fact because I'm trying to write a bit of software to be a rhyming dictionary - with options for perfect rhymes, slant rhymes (rhymes which ignore the difference between similar pairs of consonants), vowel rhymes and more.

Actually, I've spent most of the last week trying to make scripts to tidy up the raw data of spelling and pronunciation. It's either that or spend a year doing it by hand.

In the meantime, there are 179 pronouns, including such rarities as 'Yez' (plural You), Whosoever, and Hern (Hers). And 261 prepositions, including Yond, Neath and Abune.

And 65,796 nouns, the last of which is Zythum - a kind of ancient Eqyptian wine made from fermented malt.

UPDATE: Thanks to the OED's not-entirely-consistent system of classification, I've found some more:

cru	déclassé	déraciné
gratiné	journalier	lisse
affiche	aperçu	arrêt
assiette	assignat	attentat
battement	cache-pot	cache-sexe
charcuterie	chassé	comte
comtesse	congé	convive
couvre-pied	crème	cru
déclassé	déjeuner	démarche
demi-mondaine	déraciné	dévot
digestif	digue	dormeuse
entrechat	farceur	faubourg
ferronnière	ficelle	fiche
figurant	fouetté	frisson
Général	gratin	gratiné
habitué	illuminé	journalier
lavaret	lisse	loge
longueur	lycée	mandat
mascaron	mélange	mésalliance
mignardise	mouchoir	muscadin
musée	niaiserie	palafitte
papeterie	pari-mutuel	parti
pastourelle	pesade	pis
pissoir	plafond	pochade
pompier	pont-levis	potage
pot-et-fleur	poulet	renversement
répétiteur	rivière	ruelle
salle	sapin	suprême
tête	vicomte	vicomtesse
visite

2011-12-08T00:01:00.002Z

"Everybody can write about everything and freedom of science consists precisely in people deliberately writing about things they have not studied."
- Frederich Engels

2011-12-07T00:01:00.001Z

"It appears to me that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science."
- Charles Darwin

2011-12-06T00:01:00.001Z

"Who is to even say something is a clue? It might simply be a fact seen in the light of suspicion."
- Roger Ebert

2011-12-05T00:01:00.002Z

"Presence is sometimes as creative as ideas."
- David Thomson