Archives November 2007

Is Ungrammatical Text Really Harder to Read?

I’m in the middle of Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. He talks about experiments in which subjects are shown letters in random orientations, and have to figure out whether the letters are mirror-flipped or not. What was found was that people have to mentally rotate the letters they see, so that they’re right-side-up, at which point they can tell whether the letters are mirror-reversed or not. This rotation takes time.

I wonder if similar work has been done with respect to words and text. It seems that when I’m reading text with a lot of typos, or 1337-speak, or poor punctuation, or inappropriate homonyms (e.g., “who’s” when it should say “whose”), it takes me longer to read than to read text with proper sentence structure, punctuation, and spelling. I wonder whether this is just an illusion, or whether it actually takes more mental work to read the text as written and translate it into proper English.

Reality Can Be Mean

GMAFB:

DUNDEE UNIVERSITY has been accused of “antagonising Christians” with a forthcoming Christmas lecture that challenges one of the central tenets of the faith.

Second-year dental student Emily Mackie said the university’s decision to call its inaugural Dundee Christmas Lecture “Why Evolution is Right … and Creationism is Wrong” is badly timed and insensitive to Christians.

The article shows a photo of Mackie holding a ticket to the lecture. Since she’s a dentist in training, maybe she can go and tell the lecturer how wisdom teeth are evidence of God’s design.

(HT Jesus and Mo.)

I Don’t Get Creationist Humor

Over at the “playground” section of the Expelled site, there’s a video of a can-can where the dancers’ heads have been replaced by those of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Eugenie Scott, Sam Harris, and Charles Darwin. This was made with a tool at JibJab that allows you to replace people’s heads in videos they provide.

As humor goes, IMHO it’s on a par with Mad-libs, so I’m somewhat surprised to see it on the website of a serious creationist movie like Expelled. Unless, of course, it’s being marketed to people who think “Oh yeah?! Well you’re French!” is a biting intellectual retort.

I’d HT Chez Dembski, except that that post seems to have been removed (s’okay, it was basically just a link to this “review”). Oh, and just to give you an idea of where this video ranks in Dembski’s opinion, this video was removed, but “The Jude Jones School of Law is still up (albeit sans fart noises).

Monday Playlist
  • Hey Joe, Jimi Hendrix
  • Hey Jude, The Beatles
  • Hey You, Pink Floyd
  • Hey Ah, Laurie Anderson
  • Hey! Hey!, Cabaret Voltaire
  • Hey Ho!, Lords of Acid
  • Hey Bulldog, The Beatles
  • Hey Man Nice Shot, Filter
  • Hey Hey What Can I Do, Led Zeppelin
  • Hey Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had A Deal, They Might Be Giants
  • Hey Citizen!, ABC
Priest Off!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9uAWXUOeeU&rel=1&border=0]

Innate Social Skills

CNN has a story about an experiment that suggests that 6- to 10-month-old infants have at least some innate social skills:

The infants watched a googly eyed wooden toy trying to climb roller-coaster hills and then another googly eyed toy come by and either help it over the mountain or push it backward. They then were presented with the toys to see which they would play with.

Nearly every baby picked the helpful toy over the bad one.

The babies also chose neutral toys — ones that didn’t help or hinder — over the naughty ones. And the babies chose the helping toys over the neutral ones.

Obviously, this needs to be confirmed by other researchers, and one shouldn’t place too much trust in the result of one experiment, but it’s still interesting: it suggests that babies have an innate sense of “this person is friendly” and “that person is unfriendly”, based on observation of people’s behavior.

Now, this does not mean that babies or young children have any idea of “I should be friendly”, nor does it suggest that these babies can judge whether they themselves are being friendly.

The article does mention, though, that

A study last year out of Germany showed that babies as young as 18 months old overwhelmingly helped out when they could, such as by picking up toys that researchers dropped.

Note the 8-month difference between this study and the German one: presumably in that time, children learn that if they act in a friendly or helpful way, then others will be friendly in return.

So if confirmed, this should form a fairly solid basis for morality as an emergent phenomenon. We’re social creatures who want to be liked by those around us. This experiment suggests that we’re born with the ability to figure out whom to like (or at least can work it out at a very early age). We can also start modeling other people’s minds (in the sense of “if I do X, will it please that person?”) early on as well. In short, we have the capability to work out a set of behaviors that will allow us to get along, as well as the desire to do so.

Now, it’s true that we also want base self-gratification (e.g., “I want to play with that toy, so I’m going to take it away from you, and I don’t care whether it annoys you or not”). But wanting to get along with others plays a part as well. And of course children tend to believe what their parents tell them, and presumably the parents tend to teach children their own values, like playing nice with others.

So it’s a noisy and chaotic process, but over time, people can figure out what sorts of moral rules work and which ones don’t, and improve morality.

It’s sort of like Wikipedia, in which lots and lots of people making changes, some good and some bad, can nonetheless gradually improve.

(HT Martin Wagner for the link.)

I See A Pattern

Remember Conservapædia, the neocon alternative to Wikipedia’s liberal bias?

Here’s a snapshot of today’s list of today’s top ten most viewed pages. See if you can notice a pattern.

Conservapædia top ten.

(HT Wonkette.)

How Not to Lose Disks

Have you ever upgraded a machine, only to find that during the upgrade, your device names got rearranged, so that your filesystems aren’t where they used to be, and you can’t mount anything?

This happened to us at work: we upgraded a fileserver with a hundred or so filesystems on a SAN. The driver software silently shuffled the devices around, so after the upgrade, nothing got mounted where it beloned. We had to ask the users to look through the filesystems and tell us where they should have been mounted.

To prevent this sort of thing in the future, we adopted a simple trick: on each filesystem, create a file called mountpoint that says where the filesystem ought to be mounted.

Yes, this is pretty much the same as labeling each partition, as some OSes allow you to do. Except that it’s arguably more robust, because you don’t need to rely on different versions of the OS being able to read the partition label. Besides, it’s simpler, and survives backups, replication, and so forth.

Automating all of this is left as an exercise for the student.

Australia Starts the War on Christmas

According to News.com.au, Nov. 11:

SANTAS working in shopping centres across Australia have been banned from bellowing “ho ho ho” because it might frighten children.
[…]

“The reason behind that is we find that in some cases the little kids can get a little bit scared of the deep ‘ho, ho, hos’ and we ask them to be mindful of keeping their voices to a lower level,” [Westaff national operations manager Glen Jansz] said.

According to AFP,

One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use “ho ho ho” because it could frighten children and was too close to “ho”, a US slang term for prostitute.

Thankfully, today we have:

Recruitment firm Westaff, which supplies hundreds of Santas for events around Australia, has backed down from its ban on the traditional greeting following a backlash from employees.

The company wanted to ban “Ho, ho, ho” for fear it might scare some of the children.

A Myer spokesman said store management believed the expression was an important Christmas tradition.

Phillip Johnson on “Judgment Day”

On Monday, Phillip Johnson appeared on the ID the Future podcast, and talked about being interviewed for
Judgment Day, the Nova episode about Intelligent Design and the Dover trial.

He said that while the producer and crew were pleasant enough, but expressed concern that the interview would be mangled in editing, possibly to make it sound as if he were saying something he didn’t mean.

So I looked him up and asked him. He replied:

I didn’t spot any misquotation, but my interview was edited almost down to nothing (not by the team that interviewed me). I guess that is good. If I had said some silly things that the senior staff at WGBH could have used to discredit ID, those moments would have been shown on the program. If I could have picked the parts of the interview to be broadcast, I could have added a little more balance to a one-sided program.

(posted with permission.)

So no obvious quote-mining or distortion. I’ll be curious to see how this compares to PZ Myers’s interview for Crossroads Win Ben Stein’s Scorn Expelled.