On the omnipresence of limited abilities

The system-wide spelling checker now does grammar too. Bad grammar gets a green underline instead of red.

It's not the most robust grammar checker in the world—for example, it thinks "This are good" is perfectly fine—but like the spelling checker, its omnipresence makes up for its limited abilities.

— from John Siracusa's exhaustive review of the newly updated Macintosh operating system, OSX 10.5, at ars technicha

Over at Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum, who is an actual bespoke linguist and therefore to my mind entitiled to go on about such things, says a few brisk things about computer grammar checkers. He quotes Jason Snell approvingly:

"… Grammar Check—at last, the most useless feature ever added to Microsoft Word has been added to Mac OS X! With this feature, an infinite number of monkeys will analyze your writing and present you with useless grammar complaints while not alerting you to actual grammatical errors because computers don't understand grammar. Sure, it sounds great on a box—or a promotional Web site—but anyone who knows, knows that grammar checking is a sham. Just say no."

In his review John Siracusa says the grammar checker's omnipresence makes up for its limited abilities, but this can't be the measure against which he judges all poor tools. Just because it's nearby doesn't make up for anything if it can't do the job right. And now the grammar checker, which in this case is a grammar checker not even as robust as the common run of them so roundly denounced by Mr. Snell above, is just that: ubiquitous, now capable of interposing its errant stuff anywhere the Macinosh user might care to sneak off to and write a bit of something.

Mr. Siracusa has a comprehensive knowledge of the Macintosh operating sysem in all its bewildering modern-day complexity, as his review demonstrates, and on any number of abstruse issues affecting the coding of the thing he has firm opinions that are well beyond my ability to follow. But I think I equal and perhaps surpass him in my experience with poor tools. Generally, having them at hand only increases the inevitable mischief they'll work.

doglook 2

doglook 1

From the files of the Bureau of Lost or Stolen Appellations: The case of the loosed word

From the invaluable Silva Rhetoricæ created by Professor Gideon O. Burton of BYU:

ampliatio ampliatio am'-pli-a'-ti-o
from Lat. amplio, "to extend"
adjournment, an old name for a new thing

Using the name of something or someone before it has obtained that name or after the reason for that name has ceased. A form of epitheton.
 
Examples
 
Even after the man was healed from his ailment by Jesus, he was still referred to as "Simon the leper."

In the case of the indicated Simon, the name did not cease with the disease, but carried its baggage of significances forward with each new utterance, extending by ampliatio the allowed reference to the now no longer existent condition. Simon is not a leper, but he remains Simon the leper by ampliatio.

Additionally, as confimed in private email by Professor Gideon O. Burton himself, whose judgement goes unquestioned here at the Bureau, ampliatio can also serve a word back along the arrow of time into a past that happened well before the name itself was first brought up.

Thus, in saying, "Reptiles roaming Montana all those many years ago were the famous dinosaur kind of reptiles, as shown by the bone," a little ampliatio issues out of Montana, casting the word back, a made word, Montana, the newly acceptable something or other to call the indicated American place in the late nineteenth-century hurley-burley of its approaching statehood, ampliatio in our example casting the new name made for the new made state comprehensibly back into a past before that name obtained, and then dragging forward the meaning of Montana made there to suit the needs of saying "Reptiles roaming Montana all those many years ago were the famous dinosaur kind of reptiles, as shown by the bone."

Useful stuff, ampliatio. It allows for the application of the appellation along the termporal plane, the word tossed comprehensibly forward and back along the time line measured from the word's first use, leaving the messy analysis of all the other wanderings of word meanings to all your other tools.

Naturally in an effort to reduce the work flow here at the Bureau to a mangeable stream much of our attention over the years has been directed toward separating out as early as practicable in the application process those cases involving the loosed name, which are properly referred to the Ampliatio Work Group (which has operated semi-independently and only nominally under the direction of the Effectuator for some years now), rather than the lost or stolen name which is our own specialty here at the Bureau. The pre-application interview is meant to redirect such cases, but no system is perfect, and sometimes we find ourselves well along the path of processing a claim before it's discovered to everyone's annoyance that it was the loosed name not the lost or stolen one that was in question all along, the client having taken on advertently or not some appellation that cannot fail to be carried forward or now tossed back at the whim of the ampliatio engendered by it. As that which is left of the past word brought forward is so hard to lose, and what's sent back in time by the new made name can hardly be stolen from a past it never had, it's difficult to see how the resources of the Bureau, such as they are, can be of any help in these cases, but this fact is lost on many prospective clients.

/p.r.
Secretary to the Deputy Effectuator
Bureau of Lost or Stolen Appellations
WAAGNFNP (ret.)

Becoming Resigned

Sat Oct 20, 5:27am
TEHRAN(AFP, via Yahoo! News)- Iran's top negotiator on its controversial nuclear programme, Ali Larijani has resigned, the state news agency IRNA reported on Saturday, quoting the Islamic republic's government spokesman.
[…]
Elham added that Iran's meeting with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana will go ahead "as scheduled with the new head of supreme national security council," which was headed by Larijani as his official title.
[…]
Despite several meetings during the past year, Larijani and Solana have not overcome the deadlock over Tehran's refusal to suspend its sensitive uranium enrichment activities.
[…]
The West, led by the United States, believes that Iran's nuclear programme is cover for a drive to develop an atomic bomb, but Tehran insists it is for civilian objectives only.

If Iran wishes to transform itself now from an oil-producing economic power to an electrical-energy producing economic power by way of nuclear energy, then this is certainly the time to do it, while Iran's diminished supply of oil is still raking in huge amounts of cash that can be spent on such a far-sighted transformation.

In the years since the invasion of Iraq by the United States, the price of oil has risen from near $50 a barrel to nearer $90, lots of that profitable rise making its way into the Iranian economy. With all that money sloshing around in a system that is formally closed off in certain directions by international sanctions, things cost more in Iran over time. The cost of living there increases inexorably, and the general attitude so acutely labelled social unrest becomes intrinsic to all those increasingly unable to afford to live there at all.

If the belief on the part of the West, led by the United States, that "Iran's nuclear programme is cover for a drive to develop an atomic bomb" is a belief fueled by the incorrigible foriegn policy fantasies of the Bush Administration, then it is unlikely to be true in any meanigful sense, or, believed in one way or the other by anyone speaking for the Bush Administration on the matter, each of whom I personally suspect of having their own reasons for making any claim.



"Head of supreme national security council" is the official title of the position Mr. Larijani held until his resignation, according to the report by AFP. Perhaps there's a more acute translation of Mr. Larijani's job title; however it's said, introducing the blunt granduer of "supreme" into the mention of any arbitrary government job is not an uncommon move. Evidently this is the case in Iran, where millennia of government jobs have experienced the inflationary effect of introducing progressively more exalted terms for what was commonly called something else before, to the point where the significance of "supreme" itself, the logical end of such inflation, becomes deflated by regular use, and only the degree of utter generality expressed by the rest of the job title can lift it back up. The more general the rest of the title, the greater the degree of supremacy being claimed by its owner.

Mr. Larijani was given a portentious and succinct title, and a job he tried to resign from many times.

He mentioned on Wednesday that Vladimir Putin had floated a proposal to break the deadlock in the crisis when he spoke with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during his visit to Iran earlier in the week.

On Friday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the Fars News Agency there was no nuclear proposal.

It's not clear where President Ahmadinejad got this idea, which contadicts what Mr. Laijani said just a few days before. Perhaps he was told to say it by supreme leader Ayatollah Khomenei for some reason. Maybe Putin asked him to say it. Or maybe he just came up with it on his own.

At any rate, Mr. Lijani is out, and Mr. Solana, who is tasked with reporting back by mid-November to a consortium of nations including Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the United States on Iran's willingness to forswear its uranium enrichment program, is left with no one to dance with at the present time.

Continuing on with the rice for hungry people

I constructed a game from the quiz found at freerice.com, as discussed in the preceding post here at the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal).

Say you may test your vocabulary against however many words you can evaluate in thirty minutes time but must stop play if you fall from Level 50 (judging by languagehat's experience, you will). With best play, how many grains of rice can you accumulate for hungry people?

It would probably be best to read that previous post to get a sense of what the freerice quiz is about, but as for the the description of the game made from it, the statement above is unexceptional. The participant's vocabulary is tested. All who can play to Level 50 and out in thirty minutes time, do, and are discharged from the game. The remainder flounder about for half an hour accumulating more and more correct answers along their longer path to the unachieved goal, Level 50 and out, and then they stop.

The more correct answers necessary to arrive at level 50 and then out, the better for the hungry people waiting on their rice, since correct answers instantly translate into grains of rice for hungry people by the rules of the game.

So best play in this game would be to play for the entire thirty minutes, accumulating scads of correct answers, but choosing some errant definition of the word given in the quiz from time to time instead of plowing with a perfect string of correct answers directly toward the inevitable moment of exit from Level 50 and from the game, an inevitability foretold by languagehat's experience with the quiz and my own.

No one knows all the words. No one knows all the words in the list of them in Level 50 of the quiz, and few know all the words in the list of them in Level 49, and only slightly more know all the words in the list in Level 48.

The path of best play is the longest path that doesn't quite arrive at Level 50, but that extends all the way to the end of the half hour, grabbing up as many correct answers as possible without ever reaching that state where one bad choice ends the game rather that prolongs it.

This game is left as an exercise for the reader.

A nutritious game

Every time your browser loads a page that has an advertisement on it, the server out there on the internet that hosts the page registers a page hit, one of the metrics used to determine how much an advertiser pays the page's owner for publishing that ad. Here's a site that turns page hits into advertising dollars into grains of rice to feed hungry people.

If lots and lots of people visit freerice.com, the page hits pile up. The advertisers at the free rice site have been persuaded to fork over the equivalent of a few extra grains of rice for each additional page hit registered by the participants in the site's vocabulary quiz, who, if my experience is any measure, will click and click and click away at the suggested definitions, piling up the page hits and the grains of rice for hungry people, until running out of words after thirty minutes or so. Any site that can sustain the presence of an individual reader for thirty minutes at a stretch is a marvel in this age, prized by advertisers for the good chance that their pitch will be noticed if repeated over and over as the page hits mount.

I ran into the site by way of languagehat, who pointed to a Metafilter thread where freerice.com had been discussed, and mentioned that he'd reached the score of fifty.

…As you get words right, you move up to higher levels; the highest is Level 50, and I've managed to stay there for fairly long periods... but then they stump me with a word like nisus (yes, I should have studied harder in Latin class) and I drop back down.

After about twenty-five minutes I was able to reach Level 50, staying there just long enough to click on the wrong definition of the very next word and falling immediately back down to Level 49. But still, even if it was an outlier I took some pleasure in reaching at least once that territory where languagehat roams so freely, and at some point in the twenty-five minutes I realized that would be the goal, to get to Level 50 and see how long I last and stop.

The quiz is straightforward: a word is served up with four possible meanings. The participant clicks on the suspected meaning and moves on to the next page, where the choice is scored, and a further word offered up. With a series of correct answers the participant ascends to the next level until Level 50 is reached. With a wrong answer, the participant is demoted to a lower level. The quiz words are given in ascending order of obscurity, with Level 50 containing words that are almost never reached for and Level 51 presumably containing words that are never encountered at all.

Anyhow, I played the quiz simultaneously in two browser windows. I did middling in the right hand window, where I started off with a bad go and took some time getting back up into the 40's, though in the process found that I was actually accumulating a lot more rice for hungry people in that quiz than in the quiz in the left-hand browser, where I was relatively error free and rose through the levels without a lot of backtracking. Every time I fell from and then regained Level 43 in the right-hand window the slog back up to 43 was rewarded with its additional grains of rice, so that by the time I reached Level 50 in the quiz on my left I had actually managed to accumulate 50% more rice for hungry people in the quiz on my right, 1200 grains or so to 800 something.

This is a curious result. I failed more often in the right hand window, but that quiz was more productive. Because I took a much longer path to Level 48 it required many more correct answers to get there than it did to reach Level 48 in the left-hand quiz, and as the correct answers accumulated on the right, so did the grains of rice for hungry people.

Say you may test your vocabulary against however many words you can evaluate in thirty minutes time but must stop play if you fall from Level 50 (judging by languagehat's experience, you will). With best play, how many grains of rice can you accumulate for hungry people?

Human Interface Design

We have a winner.



Found on the WWII submarine USS Pampanito, berthed at Pier 45 in San Francisco.

A Hardly Strictly Followup

Sunset behind the Star Stage on Sunday at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco.


That white-haired fellow on the right is Del McCoury, singing Richard Thompson's Vincent Back Lightning, just as he does in this video, except right there live in front of a few thousand people in Golden Gate Park's Lindley Meadow, deftly transporting the crowd and Thompson's song all the way to Kentucky by way of Bluegrass.



I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people showed up for the festival this year. Many hundreds of thousands, I'm guessing. Most likely plenty attended all three days, as we did.



Earlier on Sunday I entertained the passing thought than John Langford would induce a heart attack in himself with all his vigorous prancing around the stage as the rest of the Mekons sang a chorus of "this is the end, this is the end," as shown here:



Jeff Tweedy played a remarkably long and engaging solo set to close the show on Friday night. Friday is the only day on which the Festival uses just the one stage. Saturday and Sunday's shows are spread out over five, and there's more good music than one ear can possibly entertain going on all at once all weekend long on those five stages.

Los Lobos played a sizzling set to close out Saturday's show on the Star Stage, preceded by my wife's favorite of the weekend, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, with Victor Wooten and Futureman himself, just like in the old days.

So what if we missed Jorma and the Austin Lounge Lizards and Steve Earl and Robert Earl Keen and Ricky Skaggs and Boz Skaggs, and David Grissman and Marley's Ghost and Gillian Welch and James McMurtry and The Flatlanders and Nick Lowe and the New Lost City Ramblers?

What the hey. We heard more than our fare share of good music anyhow.

Here's a picture of Warren Hellman, the originator of this million dollar bash, wrestling with his banjo, joined by Ron Thomason of the Dry Branch Fire Squad and the fine fiddler Heidi Clare.

How News Breaks

Chris Matthews speaking at a bash celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Hardball, declared he wanted to make some news with his remarks, and went on to chide the Bush Administration for trying to influence the editorial content of his show, something that had never happened under Clinton.

"They've finally been caught in their criminality," Matthews said, although what exactly led to this conclusive apprehension on the part of Matthews he left unstated, allowing the listener to assume any one of the most recent examples of the Administration's depredations for whatever Matthews meant by that. And in fact, this is a nefarious crew, the Bush Administration, with a laundry list of possible referents.



He was speaking before a crowd of people including Alan Greenspan, Ted Kennedy, his pundit colleagues Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert and a bunch of MNBC/MSNBC brass, according to examiner.com.

I think a lot of people caught on about this Administration's criminality from the very first, making Matthews's use of the word "finally" seem past due from him, coming from someone who's expected to be up on news from Washington and all.

Everyone already knows about the assaults on Social Security and on science and about Katrina and torture and the spying in on everyone everywhere in defense against fearful terror.

Somehow Matthews didn't catch that part until now, or saw no reason to share his insight long after instances of malign behavior in all these various venues had permanently convinced a vast majority of Americans that the President was a wrongheaded dolt whose polices must no longer be entertained. In public polls, Bush's raw approval rating has remained in the low thirties for more than a year now for all the reasons people have for disapproving of the bad job he's doing so willfully. Matthews, inchoate before his pundit peers, finally comes around.

Today President Bush said once again, "…we don't torture."

This is political speech, and protected under the First Amendment. He's the President, and he can say anything he wants and there's really nothing to do for it. It's in the Constitution.

He can say over and over again for all the reasons it would be politic to do so, including self-incrimination, that the United States doesn't engage in torture, and of course that's allowed. It is not by any measure true, howevermuch the definition of torture is worked over in the back rooms of the Justice Department and the White House to suit Bush's usage.

Chris Matthews may or may not report that the President gave a strong defense of the Administration's detention policies today; somebody will, if only on Fox News.

"We stick to U.S. law and international obligations," the President said, selecting his words.



There is an ocean of news of criminal torture breaking against the rock-ribbed shore of political speech pronounced by Bush today. But then again, maybe Chris Matthews was talking about something else.

Mr. Hellman's Fine Spread

Each year on the first weekend in October, on one side of the City of San Francisco you have your Fleet Week ceremonies and celebrations, with their inevitable intrusions of Blue Angels all over the city's airspace , and on the other side of San Francisco, in Golden Gate Park, Mr. Waren Hellman's nice gift to the city, the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, which he foots the bill for like a perfect gentleman.


You can chose to go for free to Speedway or Lindley or Marx Meadow in the park this weekend, putting yourself in the near neighborhood of more good music than one ear can stand, thanks to Mr. Hellman. He's the fellow in profile with his arm resting against the spray bottle in the image above, sitting with his pals at this year's Strawberry Music Festival. He likes that kind of music, and he lavishes it on San Francisco each year.

The show runs from about noon to 7pm on five stages, and draws an enormous crowd to Golden Gate Park, as might be expected. A good portion of the crowd just won't sit down, but forms endlessy refreshed streams of strollers navigating their way between the five stages or to and from strategically placed port-a-potties or food stands, but for the most part the thousands and thousands of people who show up stake out some sedentary spot in the crowd at one stage or another and stick to it.

It's so good.

Droll Patrol

Ted Koppel dares to jest in the lair of John Stewart himself.

Think Thing

If you think that, you've got another think coming.

If you think that, you've got another thing coming.

Never once in the long years I'd assumed I was familiar with the phrase had I considered that the actual asserted value of x being offered in the common enough phrase you've got another x coming, might be the word "think." Not once.

"…another think?" I thought, when apprised of this a few years back. "Think? Really?"

Now and then I notice a brief eruption of controversy over which word is correct.

But for the most part I don't think about the thing at all. And if you think I might be swayed by one side of the argument or the other, well, …no. No, I am not swayed at all.

Because, you see, I've never used the phrase myself as near as I can recall. It's just not the way I talk to people.

If you think that, you're a fucking idiot.

Yes, yes, I've used that. And…

Do check your priors!

But not the thing with the think, no.

Soak the Rich

And live happly ever after.

Earlier in the Quotidian

My brother lives in Washington near Gig Harbor. He called all of his siblings up to his house on the Key Peninsula for a weekend in August.

We went to Tacoma to see the Museum of Glass, centerpiece of the new downtown in Tacoma.



The Museum features an enormous breast-or-tilted-teepee-shaped cone of metal reminiscent of Tacoma's earlier use for its waterfront, as suggested by this image by Michael Hamilton.



The cone and the grounds around it and the attached Chihuly Brige of Glass command a vast amount of space along the Thea Foss Waterway just across from downtown, the Museum grounds connected to downtown just there by that bridge, the Museum grounds delivered to downtown by a wide stair winding around the base of the prominent cone of the museum and up to the bridge of glass and over the intersecting wide corridor of interstate highway and rail that sluices through the town there just like a river separating the two districts, nicely joined again by that happily placed bridge.



Inside the cone of the museum of glass the girders are visible. I have no idea what kind of metal is being used here. It could be alumino-titanium for all I know. Holds up quite well, whatever it is.



Here's what it looks like under the cone in the workspace where the glass is being made:



The one in the yellow shirt is leading the team. In the back you can see another similar glass being tended to while the torches get taken to the one fresh out of the oven.

Eventually the whole bunch of them attempt to join the two parts together:



The Museum shows how art glass is made (the work's progress can be followed from seats in the balcony above the workspace). The Museum shows off, too, some outcomes of all this glass making artistry with a modest number of items on display in its exhibit wing.

The untitled styrofoam cups of Chris Taylor (2005) update the Ballantine beer cans observed by Jasper Johns (1960) by thoroughly modernizing the material being observed. Here's the ubiquitous styrofoam cup, now, observed in art glass form, superceding the ubiquitous rolled sheet metal container of the commercially available stuff made by Ballantine and sold as beer commemorated in the painted bronze of Johns.

The two cups are curiously joined, as I see it.



The expanse taken up by the grounds of the Museum of Glass seems depopulated for a public space. Maybe this will change when the nearby inbuilding of urban apartment spaces is complete and the natural inclination to go somewhere nearby is established in the new residents of downtown Tacoma as they begin to flesh out the uses for such a space in their new city.



As yet the downtown neighborhood isn't densly populated enough to require quite so much space to spread out in, or renowned enough to make many travelers go to Tacoma on purpose and clog the place up on their own.

From the Chihuly Bridge of Glass it's just a short jog across the main street there downtown to stairs leading further up the hill and onto the campus of the University of Washington Tacoma, connecting the campus with the waterway by this broad pedestrian pathway, a pathway intersected on the main street by the trolley line running through downtown. This is a good and thoughtful design for an urban core minus the few hundred thousand people whose activities could easily be provided for in the space made available for them in Tacoma.

There are certainly enough people innately indifferent to weather to populate such an agreeable space as downtown Tacoma is now, now that the viscous air of the pulp mills of decades past has dissipated. Downtown Tacoma is a habitable enough space for those inclined at all towards urban living, always allowing for the inherent sogginess of the place.

Mile High

Congratulation to the Colorado Rockies, who won a thrilling come-from-behind victory over the San Diego Padres in thirteen innings tonight to win the wild-card playoff spot in the National League.

It was a tremendously exciting game, not well played defensively by either team, but absolutely riveting for the nail-biting closeness of the match and the explosive finish, which saw San Diego score on a two-run homer by Scott Hairston in the top of the thirteenth before Colorado, facing Trevor Hoffman in the bottom half of the inning, answered with a double, another double, a triple, and a sacrifice fly to win the game.

Replays showed pretty clearly that Matt Halliday, sliding home with the deciding run, never touched home plate. But, when the umpire signals safe there's not a whole lot that can be done by anybody, except rue the day forever in San Diego. It's over, it's in the books, the dagger sunk deep in the heart of Padres and their fans.