Lost in translation

In the BRT piece, On Language and reality, a take on Arrival and the Sapir-Whorf interpretation of language was discussed as language shapes how we view the world and, as conjecture, this would also apply to aliens as well due to the fact language is considered a universal requirement for any intelligent species to function but ... how a given language would actually work, among differing civilizations, is a guesstimate at best. Think Chinese, the 20,000+ pictographic language, consisting of lego block connects to convey meaning, totally differs from the modualar 26 letter construct of English, which not only poses difficult translation issues of one language into another but also in how the two cultures view reality, a notion I know first hand as I have a Chinese daughter in law who has taught me a great deal on how she views the world from a truly different perspective. With this in mind, an insightful article about the possibility of communicating with aliens via Arstechnica gives added insight into just how difficult a process this can be.

To whit.

Human languages all have syntax," she explained. "You have distinct pieces that you can put together in different orders to get different effects. Even sign languages have this. No animal communicative system has it."

"How can I possibly ask an alien, 'What's your word for friendship?'"

Beyond syntax, another feature of language is the concept of displacement. "I can talk about things," she said. "Distance, and time, and place. Your dog can't do that. Your dog can scratch at the door to communicate that she wants to go outside, but she's not going to be able to say she wanted to go outside yesterday."

It's more involved.

She continued: "You can't even assume they have things like nouns and verbs. These are things that Chomsky assumes to be part of our cognitive endowment, part of the universal grammar. There are things like nouns and verbs in every language. Why should that be true for an alien language? The naïve answer would be, 'Well, there are actions that you need to label and there are objects that you need to label.' Except that verbs aren't really action words despite what third grade teachers tell kids. A word like stagnate isn't an action word."

I asked her then as an aside—because I was legitimately curious—if nouns and verbs are universal components in all known terrestrial languages.

"Yes," she answered, "but I think there are languages without adjectives. I think there are languages without prepositions. Definitely, languages without determiners. What I tell my classes is a noun isn't a person, place, thing, or idea as you're told. Sincerity is none of those things. The only difference between the word sincere, adjective, and the word sincerity, noun, is where they go in a sentence. The meaning is basically the same thing except that one is the noun form and one is the adjective form. Yet, this whole notion of having sentences with parts of speech that play different roles, that could just be a terrestrial thing that isn't actually necessary to communication."

End game ...

Dr. Birner thought about it for a moment, then replied with a short list of things without which understanding likely cannot happen. The first of those things, she explained, is a theory of mind. Both parties need to have some reason to believe the other party has a somewhat similar cognition—that there is some basis for even bothering to communicate.

After that, symbolism is next on the list—both parties need to know that they can communicate in representative terms. This isn't necessarily literary symbolism like in high school English class. This is the notion, as discussed, that words are representative of objects and concepts. The idea that when I show you a clock, for example, I'm showing you a device that measures time rather than just a thing with numbers on it—or the idea that my spacecraft's instrumentation represents conditions inside and outside the spacecraft, rather than just being a bunch of pretty lights and dials.

Then, both parties need some incarnation of the cooperative principle Dr. Birner mentioned earlier—because otherwise, there's no biological incentive to cooperate in the first place.

 Any questions?

On Camus, Language & reaching 2600 ...

Reading Camus is a zen process as his writing is spare, direct and disciplined. One is with the arrow when reading his work as his take on reality and life is that of wary positiveness & dry humor that also comes equipped with enormous cost as per his Myth of Sisyphus essay where the never ending process of pushing the rock up the hill is obviously absurd yet remains a worthwhile endeavor when facing the enormity of an existence we will never fully understand. For Camus, the role of the artist is to educate and inform on the human condition no matter what the cost may be, an act fraught with danger and uncertainty when the creative act exposes the inner most feelings of the individual in question creating the art.

An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it. The writers of today know this. If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked. If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence. In the midst of such din the writer cannot hope to remain aloof in order to pursue the reflections and images that are dear to him. Until the present moment, remaining aloof has always been possible in history. When someone did not approve, he could always keep silent or talk of something else. Today everything is changed and even silence has dangerous implications. The moment that abstaining from choice is itself looked upon as a choice and punished or praised as such, the artist is willy-nilly impressed into service. “Impressed” seems to me a more accurate term in this connection than “committed.” Instead of signing up, indeed, for voluntary service, the artist does his compulsory service.

It is easy to see all that art can lose from such a constant obligation. Ease, to begin with, and that divine liberty so apparent in the work of Mozart. It is easier to understand why our works of art have a drawn, set look and why they collapse so suddenly. It is obvious why we have more journalists than creative writers, more boy-scouts of painting than Cézanne's, and why sentimental tales or detective novels have taken the place of War and Peace or The Charterhouse of Parma.

For yours truly, language shapes one's view of reality and different languages cause man to view reality keyed to the specifics of that given language. When reading Camus in French, the poetic clarity of his thought process comes through undistilled as translation, no matter how good, is never a 1 to 1 process but rather an approximate mapping of one language into another. When reading about the Sapir -Whorf hypothesis, this relativistic approach to language rings true, especially when the syntax of one language differs drastically from the other, i.e. English to Chinese or interestingly enough, Chinese to Japanese where the pictographic (Mandarin/Kanji) alphabet is largely the same while the spoken language of each country is anything but.

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition. Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined to include two versions. The strong version says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories, whereas the weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions.

And this ...

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art. The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible. - Camus

On reaching 2600, in conjunction with Camus and language, is a good thing without question. :)

The Language Construct

BRT has often talked about how language describes reality as language is the only construct enabling man to put in quantifiable terms, his interpretation of how reality might function, something most interesting to yours truly as a lay person forever trying to learn how reality actually works. What's even more amazing is how differently languages of the world are constructed, something most eloquently articulated in an Aeon piece titled There is no language instinct.

The basic ingredients of language, at least from our English-speaking perspective, are the parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and so on. But many languages lack adverbs, and some, such as Lao (spoken in Laos and parts of Thailand), lack adjectives. It has even been claimed that Straits Salish, an indigenous language spoken in and around British Columbia, gets by without nouns and verbs. Moreover, some languages feature grammatical categories that seem positively alien from our Anglocentric perspective. My favourite is the ideophone, a grammatical category that some languages employ to spice up a narrative. An ideophone is a fully fledged word type that integrates different sensory experiences arising in a single action: to pick one example, the word ribuy-tibuy, from the northern Indian language Mundari, describes the sight, motion and sound of a fat person’s buttocks as he walks.

And of course, language doesn’t need to be spoken: the world’s 130 or so recognised sign languages function perfectly adequately without sound. It’s a remarkable fact that linguistic meaning can be conveyed in multiple ways: in speech, by gestured signs, on the printed page or computer screen. It does not depend upon a particular medium for its expression. How strange, if there is a common element to all human language, that it should be hidden beneath such a bewildering profusion of differences.

The Tower of Babel does exist after all. :)

On the Proper Use of Language

Language shapes an individual's view of reality because without it, there is no ability to communicate what that person's view may be. At the same time, the way any given language is constructed skews the interpretation of reality the individual will have because of the form the language takes. In tech, Kanji, the Chinese characters used in Japanese writing, became the driving engine for Japan to design high resolution displays due to the fact Kanji has from 50,000 to 80,000 characters (depending on who's doing the counting), thus requiring a new approach to designing hardware to enable the Japanese to participate in the world wide digital revolution that was taking off in the mid 1970's.

At the same time this was going on, modular western languages like English, Russian and French took precedence in software development as complex algabraic expressions could be easily codified into the machine language of 0s & 1s used in telling what a computer should do with data, sound and images. (Modular Alphabet/Assembler = 0s & 1s. High level programming languages like Fortran, Cobol, Java and others work on top of Assembler to enable humans to build apps like Word, Photoshop and Excel.)

The reason for the foray into language was instigated by Dick Cavett's insightful Memo to Petraeus & Crocker: More Laughs, Please

To whit: (As speakers, both Petraeus and Crocker are guilty of unbearable sesquipedalianism, a word wickedly inflicted on me by my English-teaching mother. It’s one of those words that is what it says. From the Latin, literally “using foot-and-a-half-long words.” We all learned the word for words that sound like what they say — like “click” or “pop” or “boom” or “hiss” — but I’m sure the mercifully defunct Famous Writers School surely forbade using the “sesqui” word and “onomatopoeia” in the same paragraph. (You can have fun with both of them at your next cocktail party.)

But back to our story. Never in this breathing world have I seen a person clog up and erode his speaking — as distinct from his reading — with more “uhs,” “ers” and “ums” than poor Crocker. Surely he has never seen himself talking: “Uh, that is uh, a, uh, matter that we, er, um, uh are carefully, uh, considering.” (Not a parody, an actual Crocker sentence. And not even the worst.)

Here is where it gets serious: "Petraeus commits a different assault on the listener. And on the language. In addition to his own pedantic delivery, there is his turgid vocabulary. It reminds you of Copspeak, a language spoken nowhere on earth except by cops and firemen when talking to “Eyewitness News.” Its rule: never use a short word where a longer one will do. It must be meant to convey some misguided sense of “learnedness” and “scholasticism” — possibly even that dread thing, “intellectualism” — to their talk. Sorry, I mean their “articulation.”

No crook ever gets out of the car. A “perpetrator exits the vehicle.” (Does any cop say to his wife at dinner, “Honey, I stubbed my toe today as I exited our vehicle”?) No “man” or “woman” is present in Copspeak. They are replaced by that five-syllable, leaden ingot, the “individual.” The other day, there issued from a fire chief’s mouth, “It contributed to the obfuscation of what eventually eventuated.” This from a guy who looked like he talked, in real life, like Rocky Balboa. And there’s nothing wrong with that."

While reading this, I remember George Orwell's great essay Politics and the English Language whereby he discusses the literary techniques politicians (and others) use in stating policy or soliciting support for some god forsaken initiative (Iraq etc., etc.)

DYING METAPHORS. A newly-invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g., IRON RESOLUTION) Examples are: RING THE CHANGES ON, TAKE UP THE CUDGELS FOR, TOE THE LINE, RIDE ROUGHSHOD OVER, STAND SHOULDER TO SHOULDER WITH, PLAY INTO THE HANDS OF, AN AXE TO GRIND, GRIST TO THE MILL, FISHING IN TROUBLED WATERS, ON THE ORDER OF THE DAY, ACHILLES' HEEL, SWAN SONG, HOTBED.

OPERATORS, or VERBAL FALSE LIMBS. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: RENDER INOPERATIVE, MILITATE AGAINST, PROVE UNACCEPTABLE, MAKE CONTACT WITH, BE SUBJECTED TO, GIVE RISE TO...

The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as BREAK, STOP, SPOIL, MEND, KILL, a verb becomes a PHRASE, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb as PROVE, SERVE, FORM, PLAY, RENDER...The passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (BY EXAMINATION OF instead of BY EXAMINING). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -IZE' AND 'DE-' formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the NOT 'UN-' formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as WITH RESPECT TO, HAVING REGARD TO, THE FACT THAT, BY DINT OF, IN VIEW OF, IN THE INTERESTS OF, ON THE HYPOTHESIS THAT; and the ends of sentences are saved from anti-climax by such resounding commonplaces as GREATLY TO BE DESIRED, CANNOT BE LEFT OUT OF ACCOUNT, A DEVELOPMENT TO BE EXPECTED IN THE NEAR FUTURE, DESERVING OF SERIOUS CONSIDERATION, BROUGHT TO A SATISFACTORY CONCLUSION, and so on and so forth.

PRETENTIOUS DICTION. Words like PHENOMENON, ELEMENT, INDIVIDUAL (as noun), OBJECTIVE, CATEGORICAL, EFFECTIVE, VIRTUAL, BASIS, PRIMARY, PROMOTE, CONSTITUTE, EXHIBIT, EXPLOIT, UTILIZE, ELIMINATE, LIQUIDATE, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgment.

Sounds familiar doesn't it especially when anyone in power uses language like this. When combined with the fact this biased information is constantly pumped out 24/7 by the multinationals that own the media, one stops to consider if Orwell's vision of 1984 is possible. Click on the chart to see just how concentrated the media really is. Note: The chart is somewhat out of date.)

Who knows, 1984 may already be here.

On language & reality

Just saw Arrival and yes, it's one of the great films, along with 2001 and Interstellar, that examines how humanity deals with the great unknown which, in this case, involves communication with aliens whose connect to existence is utterly different from our own save that both species use language to define how they view reality, something BRT examined in some depth back in 2014.

The part that fascinates your truly are the beautiful logograms, the circular alphabet the heptapods use to communicate their view of time and existence to humanity along with the reason why they showed up, a process no doubt rife with complexity, nuance and the potential for dangerous misunderstanding.

From the beginning, Vermette knew the alien language would appear in circles—screenwriter Eric Heisserer specified as much in the script. The aliens regard time as non-linear, and the language needed to reflect that. But consultations with linguists and graphic designers kept leading to fictional alphabets that Vermette says hewed too closely to familiar systems like hieroglyphics, or code. It felt too human. Then one night, Vermette’s wife, artist Martine Bertrand, offered to sketch some ideas. The next morning, Vermette came downstairs to find 15 inky logograms on the kitchen table. “I said, ‘eureka.'”

The shapes in Bertrand’s paintings made it into the movie. Vermette and his team assigned meaning to the inky tendrils that project from each ring, developing a dictionary of 100 symbols. A single logogram can express a simple thought (“Hi”) or a complex one (“Hi Louise, I’m an alien but I come in peace”). The difference lies in the complexity of the shape. A logogram’s weight carries meaning, too: A thicker swirl of ink can indicate a sense of urgency; a thinner one suggests a quiet tone. A small hook attached to one symbol makes it a question. The system allows each logogram to express a bundle of ideas without adhering to any traditional rules of syntax or sequence.

The basis for the language set.

The way Louise think and perceives our world is directly shaped by the structure and other properties of the heptapods’ language. This is a linguistics concept-paradigm called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, and is the idea at the heart of Arrival.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is based on the early 20th-century work of American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir theorized in 1929: “Human beings… are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society... The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.”

Last but not least the the trailer for Arrival. 

Job loss & the moral hazard ...

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Moving along, it seems AI's going to do a number on jobs as
it's cheaper to have a bot do the deed than us rubes.

Considering that AI is literally designed to model human capabilities and thus automate human tasks, it's a fair question — and one that a group of professors from New York University (NYU), Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) may have just helped to shed a little bit of light on in a new paper, aptly titled "How Will Language Modelers like ChatGPT Affect Occupations and Industries?"

"We find that the top occupations exposed to language modeling include telemarketers and a variety of post-secondary teachers such as English language and literature, foreign language and literature, and history teachers," write the researchers. "We find the top industries exposed to advances in language modeling are legal services and securities, commodities, and investments."

So, to recap: our teachers and our financial services, according to these researchers, might just be the first to succumb to language-modeling AI like ChatGPT, which we should probably note is bad at both providing factual information, which probably isn't good for the "teaching" part, and also is very bad at math, which similarly doesn't behoove success in the realm of finance. Cool cool cool.

The moral hazard ... 

Let's just say, as a hypothetical, that someone does build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — human-level AI that, if realized, would undoubtedly change everything.

The world economy would likely turn upside down overnight, while radical changes to social structures, political systems, and even international power dynamics would follow closely behind. What it means to be human would suddenly feel much less concrete, and meanwhile, those who build the system would rapidly accumulate financial and political power.

If just one piece of technology could do all of that, you might have some thoughts about which individual or group might be the ideal — as in, least world-ending — candidate to bring such a machine into existence.

Functioning as a non-profit would make sense; money would certainly be needed to create this and any other piece of world-changing machinery, sure, but presented with the need to generate consistent revenue, both objectivity and safety can go out the window quite quickly. You'd also probably want the tech to be open-source, and you probably wouldn't want any legacy Big Tech companies to own a controlling stake.

OpenAI is for-profit, closed-source, and very much in bed with legacy tech mammoth Microsoft, which has billions vested into the buzzy AI leader. But unlike other AI competitors, who may have started out as for-profit to begin with, OpenAI has very different roots.

Dividing Line/rev II

Indeed, as Vice writer Chloe Xiang brilliantly put it, the current iteration of OpenAI is everything that the company once "promised not to be" — a pretty damn sleazy detail, especially considering that these are the folks who might just be the ones to bring AGI, if it's ever actually possible, into existence.

When the outfit launched back in 2015 — the brainchild of SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, alleged vampire-lite Peter Thiel, and Y Combinator co-creator Jessica Livingston, among other major industry players — it was open-source (hence the name) as well as firmly anti-profit, arguing that a revenue-dependant model would compromise the integrity of the tech.

"OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," reads OpenAI's introductory statement, published back in 2015. "Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact."

That statement almost reads a bit alien, considering where the firm is today. Corporate and fiscally motivated, moving with the familiar — and familiarly flawed — "move fast and break things" Silicon Valley approach, it's ventured so far from its original goal that even co-founder Elon Musk has become a vocal opponent of the company.

1 point perspective/rev II

The Moral Hazard/rev II

But three days at OpenAI’s office—and nearly three dozen interviews with past and current employees, collaborators, friends, and other experts in the field—suggest a different picture. There is a misalignment between what the company publicly espouses and how it operates behind closed doors. Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration. Many who work or worked for the company insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or feared retaliation. Their accounts suggest that OpenAI, for all its noble aspirations, is obsessed with maintaining secrecy, protecting its image, and retaining the loyalty of its employees. - MIT Technology Review 

It starts with education ...

Chris Rufo is one of six new appointees to the New College of Florida’s board of trustees.
Credit...Ian Allen for The New York Times

Nevermind this guy doesn't live in Florida, rather, he's a political appointee of DeSantis, the new and improved version of Trump bent on becoming a defacto dictator if elected president, something readily seen in his push to redifine how education, in Florida, is to be taught.

To whit ...

New College of Florida has a reputation for being the most progressive public college in the state. X González — a survivor of the Parkland school shooting who, as Emma González, became a prominent gun control activist — recently wrote of their alma mater, “In the queer space of New College, changing your pronouns, name or presentation is a nonevent.” In The Princeton Review’s ranking of the best public colleges and universities for “making an impact” — measured by things like student engagement, community service and sustainability efforts — New College comes in third.

Naturally, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida wants to demolish it, at least as it currently exists. On Friday, he announced six new appointments to New College’s 13-member board of trustees, including Chris Rufo, who orchestrated the right’s attack on critical race theory, and Matthew Spalding, a professor and dean at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in Michigan with close ties to Donald Trump. (A seventh member will soon be appointed by Florida’s Board of Governors, which is full of DeSantis allies.)

The new majority’s plan, Rufo told me just after his appointment was announced, is to transform New College into a public version of Hillsdale. “We want to provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values,” he said.

When reading this, Orwell's Politics and the English Language essay comes to mind as language, in this case, is being used to persuade the public into believing everything will be fine once"we repair what's wrong with, in this case, New College, an institution located in Sarasota"

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Orwell lives ...

Rufo often talks about the “long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by the German socialist Rudi Dutschke in 1967 but frequently attributed to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Thwarted in their hope of imminent revolution, the new left of Dutschke’s generation sought instead to bore into political and cultural institutions, working within the system to change the basic assumptions of Western society. Rufo’s trying, he said, to “steal the strategies and the principles of the Gramscian left, and then to organize a kind of counterrevolutionary response to the long march through the institutions.”

This grandiose project has several parts. Rufo has been unparalleled in fanning public education culture wars, whipping up anger first against critical race theory and then against teaching on L.G.B.T.Q. issues. This year, he is turning his attention to diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and, with his colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, will soon unveil model legislation to abolish such programs at state schools. In New College, he sees a chance to create a new type of educational institution to replace those he’s trying to destroy. When we spoke, he compared his plans to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

The values of the people who are already at New College are of little concern to Rufo, who, like several other new trustees, doesn’t live in Florida. Speaking of current New College students who chose it precisely for its progressive culture, Rufo said: “We’re happy to work with them to make New College a great place to continue their education. Or we’d be happy to work with them to help them find something that suits them better.”

Seems Rufo has read Edwin Bernays as the language he uses parrots exactly what Bernay talks about regarding the art of persuasion in his seminal work Propaganda.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

Links

Well, I found another terrific artist. His name is Jim Bumgardner and he's creating quite a stir on Flickr with good reason. Evocative and mysterious, his work shows, IMHO, how Linked Data might look as envisioned by Neuromancer,

William Gibson's first book dealing with tech, violence and the ubiquitous flow of data in a wired society.

To learn more about information connectivity, check out Paul Miller's Linked Data - The Rise of the Semantic Web? to see how it applies to Open Knowledge and the need to protect it for users and creators of content alike as civilization moves toward a world of infinitely malleable data.

From this perspective, one soon realizes that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) may presage the move toward the semantic web as it is the ultimate viral data linker, a construct that will become far more powerful when OPML (Open Processor Markup Language) the powerful yet limited hierarchical language of RSS is replaced by OWL (Web Ontology Language) the language that is not only "intended to be used when the information contained in documents needs to be processed by applications, as opposed to situations where the content only needs to be presented to humans." but also is becoming the primary language of the Semantic Web as it can link easily to bots, the digital entities that will replace us as surfers on the net mining for meaning 24/7 on an as needs basis.

The question to ask now is "When do they search on their own."
"No one knows, do one." Fats Waller

On the Notion of Rainbows

BRT has talked often about how language defines our notion of reality based on how said language is constructed, whether it be pictographic like Chinese and Japanese or modular like English or Russian. To that end, a good friend of mine posted an awesome link showing how English differs from Chinese when it comes to color, a most important aspect of describing reality without question.

Here's a fascinating visualization (seen above) created by Muyueh Lee that shows the differences between how the English language and Chinese language each describe colors. On the left, you can see the number of English names for color hues (there's a lot!) and on the right, the number of Chinese names (there's a little!).

Shown below is a dataset depicting specific breakdowns of color descriptions.

This is English

This is Chinese

Interesting, eh?

To see how this works in interactive 3D, Muyueh Lee's amazing site is the place to go as the interrelational aspects of just how deep this finding goes is truly astounding.

To yours truly, the notion that language describes our take on reality rings true as shown by Lee's incredibly creative and innovative research.

PS. Thanks Mark for turning me onto this. :)

Running in place ...

Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times

Every time one "listens" to Herschel Walker, Politics and the English Language by George Orwell, comes to mind as Walker's inability to put together coherent thoughts is sad testimony as to how low standards can go regarding anyone running for political office in the year of our lord 2022.

When challenged on reducing the cost of insulin, Walker responded: “I believe in reducing insulin, but at the same time, you got to eat right, because he may not know and I know many people that’s on insulin, and unless you have a eating right, insulin is doing you no good.”

Say what? English translation: “Healthy diets can help treat and prevent Type 2 diabetes.” The nearly two million people suffering from Type 1 diabetes, not caused by diet and for which whom insulin is needed to stay alive? Oh, well.

When Warnock accused Walker of pretending to be a police officer, Walker whipped out a badge and said, “You know what’s so funny? I am worked with many police officers.” A moderator then chastised him for bringing the “prop” to the event.

At another point, Walker said: “Well right now, people have coverage for health care. It’s according to what type of coverage do you want because if you have an able-bodied job, you’re going to have health care. But everyone else have health care, it’s the type of health care you’re going to get. And I think that is the problem. And what Senator Warnock wants you to do is to depend on the government. What I want you to do is get off the government health care and get on the health care he’s got.”

Huh? As a United States senator, Warnock’s health care is government health care.

In comparison ...

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

Any questions?

Days of Future Past/Rev L

 

IBM’s stock ended Monday as the worst-performing member of the S&P 500 following a disruptive AI announcement from Anthropic. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The sky is falling, the sky is falling. AI replaces COBOL and IBM is doomed.

 IBM fell 13.2% following a new blog post from Anthropic sharing that Claude Code can automate parts of the modernization process for common business-oriented language (COBOL), a high-level programming language developed specifically for business data-processing needs. The stock ended the day as the worst-performing member of the S&P 500 index.

Let's think about this as we're talking money, you know, the agreed upon lie on which civilization depends, something different from code driving gossip and so called nooze. This Chicken Little take also applies to Fortran as it too is an antique, difficult to code and not web savvy either but dig into the reality of these two stalwarts and one's take changes radically.

Illustration for the story "Chicken Little", 1916

The government report which introduced COBOL,
one of the world's most-used programming languages.

Cobol - Concise description - Gemini

COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) | The Financial Substrate

Primary Logic: Designed for Business Data Processing and massive file handling.

The 1% Truth: Its strength lies in Fixed-Point Decimal Arithmetic, ensuring that every fraction of a cent is accounted for without the rounding errors found in modern floating-point systems.

Hardware Floor: Optimized for Batch Processing and high-volume Mainframe Transactions; it is the "Big Iron" that manages the $3 quadrillion global payment circuit.

2026 Reality: Despite the "Anthropic Flirtation" with automation, COBOL remains  "Uncompromising" because its logic is deeply embedded in the Solid State reality of banking.

Fortran, a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language

Fortran - Concise description - Gemini

 FORTRAN (Formula Translation) | The Scientific Constructor

Primary Logic: Designed for Numerical Computation and High-Performance Computing (HPC).

The 1% Truth: Its "Secret Sauce" is Array-Oriented Programming; Fortran handles massive multidimensional arrays with a Principle of Least Action that prevents the "Administrative Heat" of modern memory overhead.

Hardware Floor: It features Static Typing and No Pointer Aliasing, allowing compilers to optimize code to the physical limits of the silicon.

2026 Reality: It remains the base for the Top500 supercomputers and was the start point for CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) math, the foundation for 3D computer graphics.

Something to think about don't you think? :)